Our experiences in our ages 0-3 is my other obsessive topic…and all the reading I’ve done on it tells me that our experiences ages 0-3 especially effect our brain’s wiring and how well/not well we handle stress for the rest of our lives. Because of the chaos of her years 0-3 she has a real struggle with stressful situations. She finds that frustrating; even maddeningly so! As we discussed it yesterday we were both getting really “mad” ’cause I could think of all the Christians who had to have lived near me back then who never had a minute of their time for me! All of this struggle Casey has now COULD have been prevented if just ONE Christian lady woulda’ taken me on and just loved me back then! If one anti-abortion lady woulda’ been pro-LIFE she coulda’ changed my and Casey’s futures so much for the better!
But, something struck me as we talked…I found one glimmer of hope in this swirl of so many people to blame and so many things to be mad about and feel a “victim” of…
God does not judge us on our neuropathways. Right? He knows what Casey…me…all of us have been thru. He knows that when “X” happens that it makes our amygdala’s freak out and say, “RUN AWAY!” or “FIGHT!” when neither response is correct. He knows how He designed our brains to work for our benefit and He more than anyone knows what happens to our brains when they get TRAINED the WRONG WAY! He knows! And, being a compassionate and loving guy He is not mad at us for the fact that we sometimes “feel like monsters” (that’s a song). That’s why we’re told IN our anger not to sin…we’re not told not to be angry because that’s not in our control…
So…God does not judge us on our “tendencies” or on our weaknesses…He sees all our struggles and sees our reactions…and so we don’t have to be so “mad” about how poorly our brains got programmed or how much we have been “messed up” by those who hurt us in the past and how when stuff happens we just “shut down”…No! He is not judging us on that. He has empathy and compassion on us for that! He judges us on our HEARTS.
Though our neuropathways make it hard for us to react in loving ways…even make it hard to react in ways that truly reflect what our hearts are made of…God sees thru that all and sees our hearts. And, though we may have a constant bitter battle for our whole lives with how our brains react to stress…no control over how much cortisol our brains wash over with and how quickly our prefrontal cortexes shut down…our hearts are ours and in our control only…We may have a struggle with our bodies because of fears we have and things that have been done to us but we will always have control over our hearts. There is power in that.
I thought that tho’ we may look at people who “had it good” when they were babies and they as adults are secure and “well-balanced” and seem to have it “all together”…they still have to decide in their hearts if they want to love God or not. Just because they react to stress better than other people does not mean that they are more likely to love God than someone with bad stress skills!
If we’re instructed as to “how to walk” as believers…and we all talk about not “talking the talk but walking the walk”…we can compare the ease with which we find ourselves “walking” and interacting with other humans to the ease with which we walk physically. Some of us end up in situations from birth or from life that make it so we need a wheelchair…or so that we tend to trip and stumble a lot. Just like some of us due to genetics or bad care from our childhoods tend to struggle with stressful or generally in social situations. But, God does not judge us for not being a good soccer player or for not being able to run marathons or walk while we chew gum without tripping because we can’t help those things.
Our “feet”, both spiritual and literal, are just our mode of transportation thru life. It cannot make us sin. Our hearts are not led by our feet…our feet go where our hearts tell them.
This is why in law there is a distinction between “manslaughter” and “murder”. Murder is sin. Murder is when with your body you INTEND to kill someone. In manslaughter, you DO the same thing with your body (use it to kill another person) but it was not intentional…and therefore not a sin. The same act with your body can either be sin or not be sin. It is not what you do with your body that makes you sin, it is the motivation in your heart that led you to do it.
I had it explained to me once that what if you walked out you front door with a gun with the intention of driving to someone’s house to kill them. You had decided that in your heart. But, your car wouldn’t start. Would you still in your heart be guilty of “murder”? Jesus says so. Jesus doesn’t say, “Whoever looks upon a woman and rips off her clothes and rapes her is guilty of adultery”…no…He says that if you allow your heart to dwell on it that you have already committed adultery with her in your heart.
That means you don’t even need a body to sin. (And, unless I’m thinking wrongly, the angels don’t have “bodies” like we do…they’re spiritual… and yet 1/3 of them sinned…)
And, therefore what this leads me to conclude is that no matter how our bodies might be born…if we were born with some kind of “sin” in our blood…there is no way it could “make” us or make us “lean toward” or “tend to” sin because we don’t sin with our bodies…we sin with our hearts. Our bodies do not lead our hearts. Our hearts lead our bodies. And, so no matter what happens in my body…it is my heart where sin dwells or it doesn’t…therefore…we the notion that our bodies are somehow born “sinful” is really a non-issue…
Even if there were some bizarre injection I could have of pure sin…even if my body were made OF sin…my body is not me…my spirit is me…my heart is me…and neither of them are controlled by my body. I control my body and sometimes I sin with it, and sometimes I don’t. It’s like a gun. Guns don’t kill people even tho’ they are made for killing…guns only kill people when someone with the intent to kill uses it for that. The same with my body. Even if my body was “made in sin” or “made to sin” or “made sinful”…it is irrelevant because bodies don’t sin…hearts do…and without a heart to drive my body to sin it can’t be sinful.
The doctrine of “Original Sin” is just…not true…period…
