VITAL STATISTICS

Porto Alegre (pop. 1,314,032) has all the tics of a burgeoning metropolis: street vendors barking their sales pitch, shoppers hustling down crowded sidewalks, city buses spewing diesel smoke into the air, businessmen in smart suits and ties, beautiful parks, two professional rival soccer teams, an art museum, St. Peter's theatre complete with balconies and crushed red velvet chairs, two large universities among others, dozens of hospitals, McDonald's restaurants, Pizza Hut, fancy shopping centers and much, much more. Spiritism, for example. I don't have recent statistics, but just to give you an idea, the following was taken from the city newspaper in 1995 on a series done about the city that "no one sees."
*There are 8,000 mediums in the city.
* An average of 93 roosters and chickens are sacrificed per hour--or more than 1 per minute, 2,233 per day or 67,000 per month.
*There are 1,500 stores or stands that sell religious articles.
*960,000 candles are lit every year--two candles per minute--at the 8,000 spiritist centers throughout the city.
Does this impress you? I was profoundly impressed and saddened by these stats until I found something that impressed me even more:

*God knows the number of hairs on my head! (Mt. 10.30) The average is from 100,000-150,000 with blondes having the most--140,000 strands. Multiply that by 6,645,490,513 inhabitants and you have a daily astronomical math problem.
*Not even ONE sparrow falls to the ground without God's approval. (Mt. 10:29) Alaska alone has 51 species of birds in the sparrow and warbler family; multiply that by all the states and regions in the world if you want to get dizzy trying to calculate this teeny part of the day-to-day happenings in the universe.
*God's steadfast love toward those who fear him is as great as the heavens are high above the earth. (Ps. 103:11) How high is the sky? If one counts the distance from the ground to the boundary of earth's atmosphere it is 100 quilometers, but if one goes into outer space to the farthest star, we are talking millions of light years away!
*God has removed our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. For starters, the distance from the east coast to the west coast in the USA is aproximately 3,000 miles.
*God has cast our sins into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:19) The deepest point of the ocean is in the Mariana Trench, seven miles down, down down--deeper than I care to go.
*God's love is from everlasting to everlasting! (Ps. 103:17) I can't wrap my brain around everlasting.
*The following cannot separate us from God's love: death, life, angels, principalities, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, anything else in all creation! (Ro. 8:38,39)

I think God has all the bases covered. Hallelujah!