The Cells That Set the Rhythm

In 1907, a young medical student named Martin Flack was examining a mole's heart in a small laboratory in Kent, England, when he discovered something remarkable — a tiny cluster of specialized cells nestled in the right atrium. He and anatomist Arthur Keith had found the sinoatrial node, the heart's natural pacemaker.

Here is what astonishes me about those cells. The SA node contains roughly ten thousand of them. They cannot pump blood. They cannot carry oxygen. They will never contract with the muscular force of the surrounding cardiac tissue. By almost every measure of what a heart cell "should" do, they appear to be failing.

But they have one purpose — to fire an electrical impulse, roughly once per second, every second, for your entire life. That steady signal tells one hundred billion other heart cells when to beat. Remove them, and the strongest heart muscle in the world falls silent.

Some of you are wondering why God has not made you like the people around you — why you do not seem to do what everyone else does, why your gifts feel small or strange. But the Creator who knit you together in your mother's womb did not make a mistake. He made you for a specific rhythm only you can set.

Your purpose is not to be every cell. Your purpose is to be the one cell the body cannot function without.