Tall Cities, Big Numbers

When I visited Hong Kong in the summer, I was struck by how many people there were. Although the territory is not without its rural areas and uninhabited mountains and forest, there otherwise seemed to be people everywhere. Despite having a low birth-rate (1.2 births per woman in 2016) its population of 7.44 million people makes it one of the densely populated places on the planet, with 17,311 people per square mile. This compares to the United Kingdom’s 1,010 per square mile. So many people occupying so little space. 

Hong Kong’s architects and builders therefore tend to build upwards rather than outwards. Soaring tower blocks have supermarkets and amenities built into their bases. Although crime appears to be surprisingly low in so tightly packed a place, food is expensive, dairy products in particular; large tubs of yogurt selling for £2 in the UK were retailing for £7 in Hong Kong.

As I write this, the world’s population is 7.7 billion. This website calculates the population growth is real time: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ More people are being born than dying, and so the population increases.

Said the Lord to Jonah in the last verse of his book:

“And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

There are so many Ninevehs today- large metropoles boasting millions of souls, jammed in, living, eating and dying together. And though they appear like ants in a mound, the God of heaven has a concern for them. Spiritually, most don’t know the difference between light and darkness, right from wrong, Christ from Belial. As our planet’s populations swells, may too the number of those willing to share Christ. Jonah was an imperfect prophet, but he got there in the end and his preaching was not in vain.