2012 May — Discovering Jubilee

Cerebral Series Part 2: Was Jesus _______?

If you Google “Was Jesus….?, you get back:
Was Jesus black, gay, real, Jewish, married, a carpenter, a socialist….all very shallow, surface questions.

It has been my experience that people shy away from examining the humanness of Jesus too closely. Maybe we are afraid of being sacrligious, considering he was also God and all. Or, maybe we don’t like to consider how many aspects of Jesus were remarkably like us.

I have heard people get angry when asked if they thought Jesus might have suffered from the teen plague of acne.
Really trivial, but if one travels down this line of thought very long, youn can reach some questions that appear alot more important.

For example, if Jesus was indeed fully human, could he have suffered from a human issue like a brain chemical imbalance? Or, do we assume he was born with a healrhy brain just because he was God? And if he did have an unhealthy brain as most humans have for at least some periods in their lives, what free choice did he have in making right decisions, and how then are we to relate to God when we are supposed to be like Jesus yet our brains may not be working right?

Another question that makes people uncomfortable….Jesus’ sexuality. We tend to approach the Jesus in the gospels in a neuter fashion, I think because we are afraid of highlighting Jesus with the belief that men “think about sex all the time. I don’t personally like thinking of him that way. However, I desperately wanr to belive that he was fully human as I am so that I know he really understands how I feel. Obviously I don’t believe Jesus ever acted on this portion of his humanity, or sinned in any way with regard to it. But,sometimes I wonder how much Jesus can really relate to each of us and our struggle to love well when he has never been intimate with anyone as in marriage? He has always had some measure of distance between himself and other people.

I don’t understand Jesus, or the mystery of being fully human and fully man, but I guess I’m not the first person with this problem. Still, I believe that “there is only Christ. He is everything.” Somehow in a way I can’t completely fathom, he made things right with God, and I am accepted by him just as I am, constant brain misfires and all.

A Cerebral Series Part 1: I’m Way More Complicated Than I Originally Thought

I haven’t been posting much lately, mainly because I’ve just been thinking about alot of things. Things that boggle my mind and evade any firm conclusions.

My husband tells me quite regularly that I think too hard too often about things that I can never completely understand. But, I’m wired this way, and feel compelled to try and understand certain things as well as possible. This series is a compilation of things that I have been mulling over, stressing over, fretting over, getting excited over, etc in the last six months or so, accelerated immensely by two books I have read in the last couple of weeks that have rocked my world and perspective on it.

I call this a cerebral series for two reasons : 1 I may possibly be one of few people who feel the need to delve as deeply as I do into the topics I’m going to talk about, so be forewarned about upcoming said posts, and 2. what I’m going to be writing about deals specifically with literal cerebral issues.

I’m way more complicated than I originally thought. My human-ness specifically, not necessarily me indivdually, but that too.

Of late I have really been pondering human behavior, how mental illness is tied to it, and how do things like free will affect it. This feels extremely important to me, as I have struggled for years with depression, anxiety, and adult ADD. How much of my issues and behaviors are hardwired into my brain, how do things like environment affect me, and how do spiritual things collide with all of this?

The two books I mentioned, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life and Healing the Hardware of the Soul by Dr. Daniel Amen have made me look at the puzzle in a new way, but many pieces are still missing, leaving gaping holes of confusion and faith struggle. He has determined that certain types of brain scans can give tremendous insight into the inner workings of he brain, in regard to mood, behavior, conflict, aggression, drug use, etc. I highly recommend his books, but to warn you, if you’re anything like me, they won’t be light reading that you set down and forget.

While I have left his books with my head in a tailspin, I have drawn a definite conclusion. There is really little place for judging in this world, because as Dr. Amen has shown over and over through brain scans, we are not seeing the whole picture behind a person when we just evaluate their behavior alone. Second, thank God for Jesus because without him we would really just be screwed. We can’t succeed by just “trying harder” and we can hardly understand ourselves, much less another person. Grace is essential to us breaking free from fear and accusation.

Check out Dr. Amen’s books, and his clinics. I’m actually going to one of his clinics for an evaluation (I’m tired of doctors “guessing” with meds and diagnoses that are given to me), so if you’re lucky I’ll post my brain scans sometime soon and you can finally see for yourself what the heck has been up with my brain all these years. :)

And, when I feel completely overwhelmed with it all, and not understanding at all how God works with us through our broken humanity, this song brings it all back into perspective.