No Junk in Your Design

For decades, geneticists believed that 98 percent of human DNA was junk — meaningless leftovers with no discernible purpose. They called it "junk DNA," and it seemed like nature's rough draft, full of crossed-out lines that never made it into the final copy.

Then came the ENCODE Project. In 2012, an international team of over four hundred scientists published findings that stunned the scientific world: at least 80 percent of what had been dismissed as junk actually performs critical biochemical functions. Those "meaningless" sequences regulate when genes turn on and off, influence which proteins get built, and help determine what makes you uniquely you.

The world does something similar with people. It looks at your past and calls it baggage. It looks at your struggles and calls them weakness. It examines the ordinary, unheroic stretches of your life and stamps them irrelevant.

But the God who knit you together in your mother's womb does not do junk. Every experience, every wound, every quiet season — El Elyon, the Most High, weaves it all into the design of who you are becoming. What others dismiss, He deploys.

You are not the sum of the parts the world considers valuable. You are fearfully and wonderfully made — all of you, including the parts no one else can see.