How big is China?

For some of you math minded people, you'll love this post, for others you might get confused. My roommate, Justin, and I were talking about some facts and figures and it blows us away. Most of these numbers are approximate, so just so you know.

On the face of the Earth, currently, right now, there are approximately 6.7 billion people. In the country of China alone, there are 1.2 billion. That's not one area that's one country. One team at the Olympics. One flag on a chart. Just one. You might say "We'll China is huge so that's why they have so many people. Here's a map of China overlapped onto the United States:

 We're about the same size. China by square miles is a little bigger. But get this, out of there 1.2 billion people, 96% of the population lives in the east (the equivalent of east of the Mississippi River). Packed into this area. In Beijing, the city I'm in right now, there are estimates of around 20 million people in the city and the outskirts. 20 million. For those of you trying to imagine that (like I am) that means if you took every person in the state of West Virginia and put them in one city ten times, it would be about the right number! TEN West Virginia's in one city! That straight blows my mind.

If you add in this other country not to far away from China called India then the numbers get astronomical. India has 1.13 billion. Now put those together and you have 2.33 billion people. That means that 1/3 of the people in the world live in these two countries in Asia. Do you know the ramifications of that? Stop. Don't think fearfully, think vertically. Wow. You want to change the world... these 2 countries look like a good place to start. You want to spread some Love around, this would be the place it seems. Wow it straight blows my mind of what kind of love could be spread here.

Justin said that according to historians (he's a history education major) that there have been approximately 10 billion people who have walked the face of the Earth. From Adam and Eve kicked things off with some gardening tips of things NOT to do, to a giant boating incident, to Inca tribes of Indian, Columbus discovering a "new world", through both World Wars and onto now you and me now staring at computer screens - there has been 10 billion people here on Earth. Ok, that sounds good. Begin to realize how deep this goes, how many people this entails, but if there has been approximately 10 billion people on the earth since it's existence started - that means that 12% of every human who has ever existed on planet earth is living in China right now. . . . . Need a minute to process that? I did. I still do. The country I'm sitting in holds 12% of the Earth's total population expanding all of time.

Wow. I never knew China was this big. I never thought about it. I knew it was big, but whoa. This amazes me. How much Love there must have been in One Man to do what He did. THAT is what blows my mind.
I was on the subway tonight and just thinking about the hundreds of people packed in there with us and how each one is so uniquely special, so uniquely made, so individually Loved that the whole world was changed.
I forget to breathe at this thought. Amazed I stagger back, close my eyes, and weep a little at the sheer thought of overwhelming Love. So much there, yet still so much unknown about what True Love is.

Each day, I feel like I get to gain a little bit more of the picture just by getting to see so many individual people. Not groups of people, or crowds, but individuals who each have a different story, who have a different mind, who have a different finger print, who have different dreams, but who have one thing in common, Love is searching for them. Throw the calculator away, it's not able to be simplified down to numbers. It's a lifetime worth of learning, to get to the end and still realize how far off we are. But so glad by the Answer that we have.