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Every day I get an update on the growth of the coronavirus around the world. What amazes me is the day to day increases that you see in some countries. This phenomenon is called exponential growth.\u00a0 From my college days, I have heard Bible teachers harp on the importance of multiplication vs. addition. They have used various examples to highlight their point.<\/p>\n
One of my favourites is from Australia. In 1859 a farmer homesick for England imported 24 wild English rabbits and set them free on his land.\u00a0 Within six years Thomas Austin\u2019s 24 rabbits had multiplied to 22 million and by the 1930s had spread throughout the country, numbering 750 million!\u00a0 Contrast this with a Thai elephant who has just one baby and takes 18 months for gestation.<\/p>\n
Another example is asking, \u201cWould you rather be given $1 million, OR start off with a penny, and every day for thirty days, have twice as much given to you each day?<\/p>\n
Yet another example begins, let\u2019s say you start with one grain of wheat in the first square of an 8\u00d78 chessboard. If you double the amount of rice with each subsequent square, by the 64th square you\u2019d have 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 pieces of rice!.<\/p>\n
Probably the simplest example is our bodies which all started off with just 1 cell and have ended up with over 35 trillion.<\/p>\n
I teach the book of Acts at the Chiang Mai Theological Seminary and I always talk about the exponential growth of the church in the first century (Ch 2 \u2013 120, but in just a few weeks? by Ch. 4 \u2013 5000 \u2026 Note: Coronavirus reached 5,000 in only one week this last January).<\/p>\n
Over the 200 years of missionary work in Thailand, we have so far only seen additions to the church which today numbers .7% of the population. Let\u2019s continue to pray that we will see, in this generation, exponential growth in the church, not just in\u00a0 Thailand, but throughout East Asia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every day I get an update on the growth of the coronavirus around the world. What amazes me is the day to day increases that you see in some countries. This phenomenon is called exponential growth.\u00a0 From my college days, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":932,"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions\/932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chiang-mai-orality.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}