Devo 28
11/08/00
If I can get this finished yet tonight, I will feel very good about myself--not only have I balanced my checkbook (not feeling so good about that :) ), but I've also managed to clean my entire room--that is a major accomplishment (I even vacuumed!) Now if I can finish this, as well as a couple other projects I'd be very impressed with myself. Anyway, enough about me...
"Mind Games"
Monday morning I watched a movie (I took the day off from work) called 'Girl, Interrupted'. The story focuses on a young woman named Suzanne who has been sent to a Psychiatric hospital after an attempted suicide. Suzanne doesn't feel she needs to be there, after all, she wasn't trying to kill herself with the bottle of aspirin and vodka, she just had a headache. And in fact, Suzanne is probably the most sane woman in the wing she is put in. Put simply, the movie is about Suzanne's quest for sanity, and ironically enough, she finds it among the insane. In fact, a turning point for her in the movie is a part where she sees on TV a portion of 'The Wizard of Oz'--the part where the Good Witch is telling Dorothy that the power to return home has been there all along through the ruby slippers. The message for Suzanne, then, is that she has, all along, had the power to find herself, to help herself, she just didn't realize it.
I'm not a psychiatrist, but I took enough psychology in college to be dangerous. I don't know if Suzanne in the movie was really, and truly mentally ill. At least not any more so than the average confused teenager. But whether she was or not, it seems to me that what helped Suzanne most was her ability to change her perspective on life. Before, she was confused with no purpose, after, she had a distinct purpose and a fresh way of looking at life. This change wasn't induced by the medications she took in the hospital. Nothing physically has changed about her. What has changed is her way of perceiving life.
You may have heard about something called 'The Placebo Effect'. This term is used by doctors to indicate a physical response to a mental stimulus. This was seen in the movie 'Space Jam'. I'm talking about the part when Bugs Bunny and his team are losing the basketball game to the Monstars. During half-time, Bugs convinces his teammates that the water Michael Jordan is drinking is actually a power drink that will make everyone play 100X better. Eagerly, the team drinks it down and miraculously win the ball game. The players didn't actually drink a power drink, it was only water, but because they thought that drinking it would give them super-abilities, they acted as if they actually had them. The Placebo Effect is also used in medicine when a doctor gives a patient a placebo rather than the actual medicine only to have the patient show all the signs of having actually received the medication--all because he thinks he is getting the medication he wanted. Our perceptions can have a profound impact on how we look at life.
To be honest, this last statement has for a long time been one of my biggest challenges to Christianity. There are times when living a Christian life seems to be doing no more than altering my perceptions of life. God and Christianity really seemed nothing more than some vehicle by which I could find meaning in life. After all, when I became a Christian, I didn't suddenly grow a birthmark in the shape of a cross on my arm. I didn't physically change in any way, all I really got was a new set of lenses to look at the world through. So now, instead of looking to please myself, I look to serve others. Instead of being depressed about a situation, I can feel content that God is in control. And these attitudes are all well and good, and I wish everyone would see more like this, but what it all came down to for me was basically just a bunch of mind tricks.
I was just mentioning today at work how it seems that a lot of Christianity is counter-intuitive--God calls us to act in ways that don't always make sense (be a servant to become great?). Isn't this just another example of playing mind tricks with myself? And if successful living is all about perceptions, then where does God fit in? In this mindset, God, and Jesus become no more than good teachers with their own ideas on how to live life. Certainly not the great creator of humanity whose greatest desire is a personal relationship with me
But that is what God is. God is the creator of our universe, the creator of mankind, and however crazy it sounds, He Loves us and desires a relationship with us. If the Bible is true, God is not just some mystical concept or moral ideal we should all try to live up to. He is an actual being with actual feelings with the actual power to create or alter the world we live in. He isn't a state of mind we can trick ourselves into, He is, and He was, and He will be forever what and who He is.
Suddenly, now, being a Christian isn't about finding the right perspective on life, it's about a relationship with the one who created life. To say that the Christian life is nothing more than a state of mind is to trample on the testimony of hundreds and thousands of people who have died for their faith--what good is a perception of life if it gets you killed. To say that becoming a Christian is merely playing mind tricks with yourself is to totally invalidate the witness of the many hardened hearts who have suddenly had their life shot through with power of the reality of Jesus and His Father. To say that Christianity is only a perception, a moralistic ideal, is not just wrong, it's insulting.
So great, isn't this entire devotional just another mind trick to play on ourselves to push us more towards the Christian life. Well...yes, partially. See, mind tricks aren't all bad. Let's look again at placebos. Though I can't say for certain, I think one of the main reasons that placebos can actually help a patient is that it frees the mind of certain restraints keeping the body from healing itself. Say a man runs in to the emergency room complaining that he has little gnomes running around in his lungs causing him to breath heavily. Clearly, there are no little gnomes, but the man's mind is convinced of it. So what does the doctor do, he takes his Evian bottle, slaps on a label that says 'Gnome Killer' and tells the man to drink it. Seconds later the man is calm again and is able to regain his breath. Not because actual gnomes were cleared out of his airways, but because his mind was put in a condition were he could mentally, and physically see that the gnomes are gone.
And maybe that's how these, and other, devotionals and myriad other forms of Christian encouragement work. Having fallen from God, it is inevitable that mental hindrances to living a Christ-like life will emerge--that's called sin. And as we all (should) know, the first step in dealing with our sin is to confess it before God. Faith, essentially, begins as a mind trick--believing that we have sinned, believing that Christ died for our sins, believing that He wants to be with us. But that's not the end. Because when we believe all this, suddenly all the hindrances we had built up in ourselves are swept away allowing God to move into our lives. In a sense, all of Christian living can be seen as a constant breaking down of mental barriers allowing God more and more control over our lives.
The key here is that God is alive and active and personal and ready to work in and through us. No other religion or system of belief can say this. With them, it really is just mind tricks to believe their teachings. With God that's only the first step. Because once we start to believe, God is able to get a foothold in our lives and change us forever. So yes, partly Christianity is about putting ourselves in the right frame of mind, but we do this to allow God the greater control of ourselves. In essence, we as Christians aren't so much playing mind games with ourselves as we are putting our minds into a condition that God can work with.
I hope some of that made sense.