My son and I were filling out our March Madness brackets, and we looked up the odds of achieving a perfect bracket. A Duke math professor calculated the odds at 1 in 9 quintillion, which is 9 followed by 18 zeros. Would you believe that the odds of you existing are even more improbable?
A Harvard professor calculated the odds of your mother meeting your father at 1 in 20,000, and staying together long enough to marry and have children at 1 in 2,000.
Mom has 100,000 eggs and Dad produces 4 trillion sperm during their reproductive years, so the odds of the one egg and the one sperm meeting that resulted in you are 1 in 400 quadrillion.
Add that to the odds of your parents meeting and staying together, and your improbable existence is 1 in 1.6 septillion, or 1 followed by 25 zeros. Said another way, you are 170 million times more likely to fill out a perfect March Madness bracket than to exist! And that’s only considering one generation!
Let pray today from Psalm 139, marveling at the miracle that each of our lives is.
You formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother’s womb. I praise you, because I am wonderfully made; wonderful are your works!
My very self you know. My bones are not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, fashioned in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw me unformed; in your book all are written down; my days were shaped, before one came to be. Amen