Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!
On December 10, 1996 Jill Bolte Taylor experienced a stroke. A malformed artery in her brain ruptured and within 30 minutes, she was reduced from a highly functioning, PhD level neuro-scientist to a functional infant, curled up in a ball on her bedroom floor. Somehow, in the process, she managed to call a coworker, who quickly figured out what was happening to her and called for help.
Jill spent the next 8 years recuperating from her stroke and eventually reached a level she considers ‘full recovery’. Because of her understanding of brain functioning and anatomy she was able to write a compelling and detailed narrative of her stroke and recovery, which she entitled “My Stroke of Insight”. One of the truly amazing things she describes is the shutdown of the left hemisphere of her brain, which left her completely in her ‘right mind’.
Her right hemisphere was not affected by the stroke, so it naturally took over and became foremost in her awareness. In her right brain functioning, she reported that she felt an overwhelming sense of peace and well-being. She no longer had the perception of being a solid person with boundaries around her physical self, but felt as if she were a liquid and that she was united with the energy of everything in the universe.
She imagines that she experienced a sort of ‘Nirvana’. It was beautiful and peaceful beyond description – and she loved it! … so much so that choosing to re-engage her left brain and all its functions during her rehabilitation was very difficult indeed.
Bolte says that what characterizes the left brain is constant ‘chatter’. The left brain supplies the constant ‘self-talk’ which orients us to who we are, where we are, and where our body begins and ends. It houses our speech centers as well as the functions which allow us to read and think in a linear fashion and experience time sequentially.
With the right brain, it’s just the opposite. Instead of words, it thinks in pictures. The right brain is very in tune with the emotional content of our experiences – but it doesn’t have a category for Time. When in our right brain, we feel that time stands still and that we are One with the universe, completely non-judgmental and at peace with ourselves and others. The Right Brain is extremely aware of the essential connectedness of all things. ….
Now to illustrate how these two halves work, I’d like to ask you to help me with a little demonstration. I’d like the right half of the congregation ( my left) to repeat this word: “Peace.” Now the Left half (my right) of the congregation I’d like to repeat the word “Chatter”
Here’s how I’d like you to do this: Right Brain repeat P-E-A-C-E softly and slowly over four counts.
Left Brain repeat “Chatter!” quickly in a staccato fashion:
“Chatter! Chatter! Chatter! Chatter!” over four beats.
You can immediately see that the Left brain pretty much dominates most of the time unless we tell it to chill and allow the right brain functions to come forward.
With apologies to the health care professionals in the congregation today, we might say the Right Brain lives in what the Bible calls ‘the Peace of God that surpasses all understanding’ (Phil. 4:7), or what our text for today terms: “the mind set on the Spirit’ (Rom. 8:6).
God wants us to be in our ‘right’ mind - to be focused on the things above and upon His Peace - but there’s a bit of a paradox here:
As beautiful as it is for one’s Right Brain to dominate, without the left brain, there would be no definition of Human Being! We would live in a perpetual womb of peace and tranquility and have no motivation whatever to proceed beyond the ecstasy of the present moment, no reason to even protect ourselves from lethal attack because we would have little capacity to respond in a coherent way. So the challenge is: how to get the two minds to work together?
In the wisdom of God, we have a bridge between the two halves of our brain, called the Corpus Callosum, which enables the two parts to communicate and make us fully functioning humans, capable of living in the world.
Jill Taylor had enough of her left brain function and memory left that she knew she had to get back her full Left Brain Capacity in order to Live. Using this bridge between the two halves she was able to choose to recover, but also to become aware of the undesirability of certain aspects of her Left Brain, namely: being self-critical, judgmental of others, impatient and arrogant. Jill remembered the unpleasantness of this type of behavior and decided she did NOT want to recover many of these behaviors.
In the language of our lesson from Romans, she did not want her mind to be set on The Flesh, but on more spiritual and humane values that make life with others possible and even pleasant.
Let’s think about this a little more pointedly in terms of a very ‘fleshy’, very Left Brain activity: Worry, or what Taylor calls “Left-Brain Loops'
Many of us find ourselves consumed with worry about the future, worry about our children, worry about our finances, worry about our marriages. Worry Worry Worry. We are often completely distracted - even to the point of tears. Presumably it’s because we’re allowing our Left Brain to dominate – just giving in to the natural state of things.
But also consider that it’s our Left brain that has to process and apply something Jesus said: that if we would trust Him, and seek first the Kingdom of God we would have peace and all the things we worry about would be added to us. (Mt. 6:33).
So, probing a little deeper, we can ask, “Why do we fail to enter into the peace that comes with (rationally) trusting God?
Let me suggest that somehow, we perceive a positive value in our worry, anxiety and fear. This seems nonsensical. Surely we would think that there is no positive value in worry and fear.
But wait. “Perceive” is the important word here.
I would submit to you that worry – ‘setting our minds (left-brain) on the flesh’ gives us a perception – a false one - that we are doing something to prevent bad things from happening! The Left-brain thinks: “If I just go over this one more time, I can stop the catastrophe!” The only problem is that this simply doesn’t work – does it?! So why do we do that?!
Here, I think, is a key to understanding this dilemma: Our brains really don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy. If you imagine something happening, your body responds as if it really IS happening.
Olylmpic athletes know this is true and can profitably spend as much as 40% of their practice time mentally rehearsing their sport – the Body responding as if it were really skiing downhill or swimming to break a world record! Our bodies serve our brains faithfully and so carry out physical action in accordance with what the Brain dictates – even if it’s an imagined disaster!
And this is exactly what happens during WORRY. We become absolutely convinced that something terrible, something life-threatening is about to happen and we believe it is up to us to fend it off! … Because our bodies serve our brains faithfully, the body begins to act on this life-threatening event!
The digestion shuts down, blood is pumped to the extremities. The heart beats faster and the respiration speeds up. We are fully engaged in the classic fight or flight response, ready to take up the challenge. The only problem is that the disaster has not actually taken place and our bodily preparations are an exercise in futility. Worse, they can actually kill us slowly over time.
In other words, the Mind set on the Flesh is DEATH! Just like the Scripture says!
To illustrate this, think of taking a drive on a muddy country road. You come to a quagmire and get stuck up to the axles in mud. If your vehicle could be compared to your body and brain, the wheels (your body) would quickly report that they were stuck and couldn’t get out. The engine (your brain) would respond by speeding up and putting out more power to the wheels. The wheels spin and spin, but are still stuck. Now the brain thinks it is doing its job quite well, but the body is screaming out, “ No, No! We’re burning up back here! Stop!”.
This is a picture of someone stuck in chronic anxiety, constantly stimulated by adrenaline, holding on to the illusion that speeding up will solve the problem, but threatening to burn out through the effects of stress on the body.
Action Needed
What then, would actually get our car out of the mud? We could try to put something under the wheels to increase the traction, maybe also increasing the weight to the drive wheels somehow, or we could call someone to pull us out of the mud. In a word, we would have to take Action. Action is the antidote to Anxiety. But it must be effective action, not the illusory action of simply speeding up with no effect, not just empty ‘Chatter’. Somehow we must find an activity that both brain and body will accept as Action in order to reduce our anxiety. Happily, efficacious Action is both simple and easily accomplished.
One very simple Action is to write things down on a piece of paper. Especially late at night, or when we are tossing and turning in our beds, worrying about something, it is very helpful to actually get up out of bed and write down the things that worry us. Then we sketch out possible courses of action we think might fix the problems. When everything is laid out on paper, our brains will accept the notion that we have done something and we can go on to the business of falling asleep. We have made a tentative plan and written it down. This writing is the difference between planning and anxious worry. A plan can be written down, anxious worry cannot.
Beyond writing things down, it is necessary to actually do something; make arrangements to pay an outstanding bill, talk to someone you’ve been at odds with, complete a project you’ve been putting off. Do something that will relieve you of the need to worry.
As Christians, of course, the best Action available to us is prayer. Prayer is a decision to tell the Left brain to chill out! It’s a decision to cross the Corpus Callosum bridge and set oneself in our right (spiritual) mind!
Prayer is also talking to Someone who has the Power to do something about our problem! Eph 3:20 tells us that “God is able to do “exceedingly abundantly above all that we think or imagine”…
Left Brain, you’ve just met your match!
The Creator of the Universe is bigger than your understanding of your problems! He’s not limited by your puny imagination of how these problems can be fixed! The God who figured out how to defeat our SIN problem by sending His own dear Son to die for us on the Cross certainly has no difficulty figuring out how to fix your money problems or your issues with your spouse or children!
But we somehow have to get our Left Brain to acknowledge this and to stop trying to be so ‘responsible’. Yes, that’s right, ‘responsible’.
I believe that the reason we have so much trouble with Worry is because it masquerades as ‘Christian Responsibility”.
This false “responsibility” is based on the wrong assumption that I am in charge of the Universe and that I must do something about impending disaster. - as if God had died recently and left me in Charge.
Well, I have news for you. God is still alive! I checked the obituaries this morning and didn’t find his Name in there! ( mine wasn’t either).
God is Alive !!! And because He’s alive and In Charge of all things, I can talk to Him about the things that worry me. I can give it over to Him, knowing that He has both the Power and the Resources to do something about it! I can stop my ineffective and puny attempts to fix my problems! I’m FREE to be ‘irresponsible’ – as I TRUST GOD for what I need!
So this is the way out of our two-brain dilemma:
Be ‘Irresponsible’ … by Trusting God.
The only hitch being that you have to take the time to calm the Chatter of the Left Brain and set your mind on the Spirit. The usual way to do this is to practice Silence – to turn off the noise of the outer world and dial down the Chatter in your head in order to ‘cross the bridge’ over into your Right Mind, so that you can focus on God and on His Peace.
This is why it’s so important to have a ‘Quiet Time’ during the day at some point.
Most people find that morning is a good time to quiet oneself – but you can – and should - take time during the day to dial down and set your mind on the Spirit. “In returning and rest you shall be saved: in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” says Isaiah (30:15). Returning to God and resting in Him is what helps us to keep our sanity in the midst of a Chattering and crazy world. Setting your mind on His Spirit is life and health and peace, just as our text tells us. ( Romans 8:6).
So, just to leave you with a taste of peace, let’s have both halves of our congregation act as if we are ‘Right Brains’ and say “Peace” together.
“P-E-A-C-E, P-E-A-C-E, P-E-A-C-E,” ….
Now may the Peace of God which surpasses understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus, and may Quietness and Trust be your Strength, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, AMEN.
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