by Rev. Bob Johnson
Our beliefs do influence our physical bodies! Some will say 'Well, I knew that!'; others will be far more skeptical. Yet recently an explosion of knowledge in neurosciences has uncovered dozens of chemical messengers that the brain uses for its far-ranging influence in the body and communication between the cells in our brains. What was once believed as an article of faith has become a fact of science.
What does this mean for you and me attempting to make sense of the lives we live and the beliefs we attempt to live by? What these new insights are telling us is that our faith and the science we thought were so far apart are much closer. Our brains are highly responsive to the environment and to our interpretation of it. This simply means that our interpretation is determined by the belief system we follow. That belief may, or may not, be Christian. The point is that the body is the outward manifestation of the mind. In other words, "The soul is the meaning of the body and the body is the expression of the soul." The more positive, the more loving we can be, and the more likely we will have a positive health history. Obviously the more negative, the more open we are to the negative happenings in life--namely illnesses of one kind or another.
Now if God is love and love is what God wishes us to express to each other and toward ourselves, could it be that the more cynical or pessimistic we are the more likely we are to become ill?
More to come next week.