It boggles the mind

Yesterday in his sermon our pastor quoted a statistic I found startling. He had read somewhere that a person can have as many as ten million thoughts a day, which comes, he said, to over three and a half billion--with a B --thoughts a person can have in a year. My first thought upon hearing this interesting factoid was, "How could someone possibly have figured that out?" and my second thought was, "To be even more accurate, though not precise, one could have 3,650,000,000 thoughts in a year, unless it's a leap year, when one could have 3,660,000,000 thoughts." Either way, that's a whole lot of thoughts. A plethora, my son-in-law would say.

When I got home I did the math on my handy-dandy calculator. Sixty seconds in a minute times 60 minutes in an hour times 24 hours in a day gives you 86,400 seconds every day. So if you divide 10,000,000 thoughts by 86,400 seconds, you discover--if I heard the pastor correctly--that a person can think 115.74 thoughts per second every single second of his life. My third thought was, "That leaves no time for sleeping" and my fourth thought was, "That's almost as often as certain mainstream media outlets mention O.J., Britney, Nicole, Paris, and Lindsay." In case you were wondering, that fourth thought falls into the category of very unimportant (readers of this blog's first post, smile here). I did not say those five people are very unimportant. People can never be unimportant. They have souls. Try praying for them instead of condemning them or dismissing them as unimportant.

The ".74" part of the 115.74 thoughts per second got me to thinking even more (a fifth thought, maybe?). I know something that takes less time than a thought, less time than even three-fourths of a thought: a twinkle. I don't know how many twinkles can occur in three-fourths of a thought, but in the time it takes for an eye to twinkle, Christians believe they shall be changed. It says so in the fifteenth chapter of the book of First Corinthians in the New Testament, verses 51 and 52: "Behold, I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." Read the whole chapter sometime. It will boggle your mind. And don't stop praying. Anyone can change. Even Britney, Nicole, Paris, and Lindsay. Even O.J.