Most of us take our lives for granted. Most of us don’t stop to think how we received life or why. We know the biological process of conception, but have we thought beyond that? What about your chances of being born? First you have to consider women have only so many eggs and limited child bearing years. Peak reproductive years are between teens to late twenties. By age 30 the ability to get pregnant starts to decline. This decline becomes more rapid once a woman reaches mid 30’s. By 45 fertility has declined so much that getting pregnant naturally is unlikely for most women. Over the course of a man’s life he will produce roughly 525 billion sperm cells and sheds at least one billion of them a month. Keeping in mind one of these billions became half of you, had it been shed along the way, you would have been shed too. Taking just this into consideration, scientist estimate the odds of being born are 1 in 400 trillion. Now looking at ancestry- from the beginning of time and the first humans, just the right two people had to find each other and come together at just the right time to create your ancestor and the process had to continue through 400 generations. In addition, your ancestors had to survive illnesses, diseases, accidents, famines, wars, etc. in order to create. This makes the odds of you being born much smaller than 1 in 400 trillion.
Going over my ancestry I came across a note related to my great-great grandfather. He was killed falling off a hay wagon when my great grandfather was just 6 months old. Considering this, my great grandfather was close to not being conceived. Had he not been, my grandfather, nor my father or my sisters or myself or my children or grandchildren wouldn’t have been either. It’s perplexing to think how just one change of events would change the outcome of our future or lack of. There are two schools of thought, one is life just happens as a random series of events with no external force or plan. The other is, all life is predetermined and there is a reason for everything. Whichever way you chose to believe it’s still undeniable, your life is a miracle. The definition of a miracle is an event so unlikely to happen that it probably won’t. Considering you have less than 1 in 400 trillion chance of being born, the probability of 22 million people rolling a trillion sided dice and coming up with the same exact number (Source: http://visual.ly/what-are-the-odds), by definition, you are a miracle. Now that you know you’re a miracle, so is everyone else in this world. Still, that shouldn’t make you feel less of a miracle. You were given life and the odds were against you, so much so that your chances of being born were almost 0. Taking this into consideration, do you value, respect, and appreciate the life you’ve been given? What about the other miracle lives around you? I think if people understood the wonderful miracle of life they have been given, maybe they would live their lives differently, maybe they would make better choices, maybe they would take better care of themselves and maybe they would take better care of each other.
~Teri Storm

Psalm 139:15-16 ESV
15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.