Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created (Revelation 4:11).

The story behind your existence is wilder than any story humans have imagined. Have you ever thought about it?

Statistically speaking, you should not exist. How unlikely was it that your parents ever met? And even when they came together you were just an argument or headache or television show or phone call away from never being conceived.

Multiply those by millions of converging conversations and glances and illnesses and books and storms and dreams and travels and schools and wars and ambitions and sorrows throughout human history that had they been altered just slightly, you would not be.

And nothing that happens to you today is really ordinary. Every small and great thing you encounter or do has millions of stories behind it that are so enthralling that you would sit dumbstruck for days just to learn about them.

And your extraordinary life is shaping and being shaped by many other lives, human and non-human, as it goes along. In ways both witting and unwitting your words and actions are influencing the course of other lives. Your choice of a parking spot could have a life-altering effect on someone else.

Do not let a belief in the sovereignty of God dull your amazement over this. Let it add, not detract, from your wonder! Just think of how God designed his creation to occur.

15 million birch tree seeds in a season might produce a tree or two. A few hundred ova and a few billion sperm might produce a few children over the course of a marriage. Some 200 billion galaxies and more than 70 sextillion stars might produce a planet that sustains life, not to mention incomprehensively complex, marvelous, conscious beings who can contemplate the glory of such improbabilities.

Some look at creation and see meaningless randomness and natural selection. What do you see? Do you see the staggering glory of divine selection (election) out of all the possibilities? And all that glory before we even get to the most glorious story: redemption!

You live in a universe that is filled with trillions, septillions, bazillions of creations, some incomprehensibly huge and others inconceivably small. And each one, like you, so unlikely, so improbable as to be miracles, whose very existence would cause each of us to exclaim in worship: “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created!”

If we just stopped long enough to look.