Brains

Brain definition: an organ of soft nervous tissue contained in the skull of vertebrates, functioning as the coordinating center of sensation and intellectual and nervous activity.

While I rode for a couple of hours today, the whole ride was focused on our brains. Have you ever thought about your brain for a couple of hours? It can be mind boggling. No matter how hard I tried to think about other things, it all came back to the brain. My brain wouldn’t let me focus on anything else, other than a safe ride of course.

Our brain is truly the one organ that determines everything and makes us all different. It’s not our color, our sex, or our family lineage. It’s the brain that makes us who we are. We could have a heart transplant, a lung or kidney transplant, get blood from someone else or their marrow, but we can’t get a brain from someone else. If we receive someone else’s organ or blood etc., our brain is then controlling that within us, but we are still the same person we were technically. Have you ever heard the saying 2 heads are better than 1? I’ve never heard 2 hearts are better than 1, or 4 lungs or kidneys are better than 2. It’s all about the brain.

When children are little they’re often described as having brains that are like a sponge, they take in everything they see and hear and learn from it. Everything; good and bad. I guess that’s why as we grow up, we make the decisions we do. It’s based on what our brains were fed; the foods, the thoughts, the experiences. How we think is determined by what we were subjected to throughout our lives. The brain is an amazing organ.

If it is formed normally, we really all have the same abilities to make the same decisions. Even if we have different experiences, we still have access to information that can change our thoughts and actions.

Even those whose brains may not be normal due to birth defects or accidents or any other number of things, still have the ability to learn or relearn things in many circumstances. That to me is also amazing. There are people who cannot do basic every day activities like bathing or preparing their own foods, yet they can play a musical instrument like a pro, it’s how their brain is wired. On the other hand there are people who are considered geniuses based on their IQ, yet they cannot communicate effectively with others in a simple conversation or may appear to have no “common sense.” The brain is basically the same organ in the majority of us, yet no 2 of us are alike.

How we each perceive the things we see, hear, and experience is different. Sometimes we make decisions not based on what our brains are telling us the decision should be, but on what our hearts tell us, or what our guts tell us. Why is that? What would the world look like if we always made decisions based on our brain and not on our gut or heart. I believe it would look very different.

I know many decisions I have made from the heart or gut would have been very different if I’d made them from what my brain would have chosen, logically. Sometimes you just have to go with what you feel is best at the time though and go from there.

Fortunately, if we make bad choices, we do sometimes still have the ability to redirect things or at least use our brains to help us ask for forgiveness and try to make things better or different. We can’t change past choices, but we can use our brains to learn from them and to also try to teach others not to follow our bad choices. That’s not something our other organs can help us with, only our brains.

What an amazing organ it is. Without a brain we are nothing. Machines can make our hearts, lungs, and kidneys function but if we are brain dead, there is no machine that can change that. Only a miracle from God could do that.

With that said, why is it that we can all hear and read the same information and yet all believe differently? I believe it’s because we are all given many facts and we are also given the freedom to choose. We choose which facts we believe and which facts we do not, and we do so with our hearts.

Romans 10:9-10

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.