The "Can Man" came to see yesterday. I have known him from the soup kitchen and some other conversations in the past. He is a complicated person. (Aren’t we all?) He needed some money for gas, for flatbed trucks to move his stuff up north away from everybody. Needed to move while the snow is on the ground and before the dirt roads thawed. The story in his mind unfolded to me: the government, "they" ..the missiles...what the Bible said... and so on. He had an idea in his mind. The ideas in our mind do affect our behavior and outlook. Some ideas set us up to live in worlds of paranoia and suspicion.
Where do those ideas come from? How do they get "in" us? For this person, I suspect an untreated mental health concern. Our "ideas" can be a complex interplay of biology and brain chemistry, relationships, feelings, beliefs and circumstance. I don’t have the professional skill to address or understand that "science" and I am probably exposing my ignorance of the subject.
But I live with the power and reality of ideas. How do you get an idea into a person’s mind?
How do you change a person’s mind?
Rollo May, the famous American psychologist, wrote somewhere (I don’t have the source) :
"I was seized then by a moment of spiritual reality: what would it mean for our world if He had truly risen?"
Here in this Holy week and upcoming Easter message of resurrection, in a sense, I am trying to get an "idea" into my mind, and into the mind of others..maybe something like Rollo May’s "moment of spiritual reality"
Is it more than an "idea" that is offered in the Risen Christ who says "Fear not."
Well....maybe you get the "idea."
Maybe we can get the Spirit of it?
Keep that in mind?
It could determine the way we live and see the world.
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