October 01, 2012
I Spy
It’s that time of year when gardens tend to over produce. I am amazed
that every day I can find vegetables that I missed picking the previous day. I
can understand cucumbers being overlooked because they blend so well with the
leaves. But for the life of me I can’t understand ripe tomatoes – bright red,
orange and yellow – that are able to escape my contortions of bending, stooping
and lifting of leaves. Transferring this image to fellow believers makes me
laugh. No doubt I’ve been guilty there as well of overlooking the Fruit of the
Spirit that they produce.
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Gail;
-----I’ve written a number of times about the mental and emotional problems of my mid-twenties which God helped me overcome. I could have sought psychiatric direction. But the evening I determined to face and battle those problems, I knew the only direction that could be ultimately victorious comes from God by His Spirit through Truth itself: Jesus Christ. So my next thought was the desire to know what went wrong in me from the dusty attic of my mind to the cobweb laced basement of my heart. I asked God to guide me out of that dysfunctional psychology in a manner that would teach me how the soul works. He did. My heart and mind are now full of thanks to Him and praise and wonder for Him.
-----I fluster when I charge back and forth looking for something in particular while not seeing it under my nose at the crossing of every different path I’ve taken at least three times before. And I swear this seems to happen once a day or more! I hate to say it, but I feel almost as much relief when I see Char engaged in such fruitless searching as I feel frustration when I’m caught in it myself. (Often Char’s the one who finds what I was looking for.)
-----The relief is that this problem of not seeing is not a character issue alone. It is actually an effect of the way our brains are physically wired. And there is a response to it that will help. Eye-sight is processed in one area of the brain, while the application of meaning to visual pattern recognition happens in a couple other areas. Consciousness is the function of many areas of the brain working in coordination, giving rise to not only registered meanings of what we see and hear in the moment, but also registering the many reflections that sensations cause while maintaining some of the course thoughts and emotions have currently been playing through the mind. When all this is harmonious, mental clutter is low. Then the processing of the primary senses (sight, sound, etc) interacts well with the processes of pattern recognition and meaning. Those bright red, orange, and yellow tomatoes become quickly found. But it is when all of these processes are cluttered by too much mental activity or too much topical variety that chaos begins to interfere with the co-ordination between visual input and the recognition of what is seen. Consequently, those bright red tomatoes can be right out in the open, squished against the nose, and still not register upon the mind.
-----It is not that the activity consuming the mind was necessarily wrong or bad or sinful at all that one or both of the mental processes were insensitive to the impoertant topic - tomato. The sum of that activity could have been gloriously right, truthful, and blissfully wonderful contemplations of the Lord and His Scripture and life. It’s just that the mental processes were not those of see-and-recognize-tomato.
-----The very same thing happens when we are amongst our brothers and sisters. God does fill our hearts and minds with wondrous thoughts and feelings about Him and others and His creation and Word and all things pertaining to the truth of what He has been doing and is and will be doing. But in as much as each one of us is a mental and emotional context subtly different in many ways from any other, these thoughts and feelings consuming our souls are rather tailor made to the individual. So when we get around others, if we do not lower the degree of our own tailor made mental activity towards the Lord or whatever else, we can directly experience the mental activities of others all day long and never recognize their fruitful characteristics, the truth of their ideas, or worst of all, the reality of their needs.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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