I'M LOSING MY MIND

From My Perspective - - -

When a person becomes frustrated and/or exasperated, an utterance that is sometimes heard is: “I’m losing my mind.” When it is uttered to a spouse or child, the expression is: “You’re going to cause me to lose my mind.” Hopefully, this is just an idle expression rather than a diagnosis of reality. What is the mind and in what ways can it impact one’s thinking and actions? A phrase that would find application in various situations would be narrow-mindedness. This would be descriptive of a person who sees the world through a very small prism and interprets life accordingly.

In December 2001, Ron Howard released a film entitled “A Beautiful Mind.”  It represented the true story of prominent mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr.  Russell Crowe is the actor who portrays the brilliant but arrogant and conceited professor Nash. A review of the film states: “He is visited by an Agent from the Central Intelligence Agency who wants to recruit him for code-breaking activities. But evidence suggests that Nash's perceptions of reality are cloudy at best; he is struggling to maintain his tenuous hold on sanity and his wife Alicia suspects a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Battling decades of illness with the loyal Alicia by his side, Nash is ultimately able to gain some control over his mental state, and eventually goes on to triumphantly win the Nobel Prize.” Shortly after this film was released, Newsweek Magazine, March 10, 2002 featured an article: “The Schizophrenic Mind” by Sharon Begley. In terms of what causes schizophrenia, she writes: “Neither doctors nor scientists can accurately predict who will become schizophrenic. The cause is largely unknown. Although the disease almost surely arises from neurons that take a wrong turn during fetal development, it strikes people just on the cusp of adulthood. Whatever the cause, it seems not to change in frequency: the incidence of schizophrenia has remained at about 1 percent of the population for all the decades doctors have surveyed it. There is surely a genetic predisposition, but not an omnipotent one: when one identical twin has schizophrenia, his or her twin has the disease in fewer than half the cases. Treatment is improving, but a cure is not even on the horizon.”

The Ad-Age Website entry for March 03, 2011 featured an article based on the slogan: “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste - An Iconic Campaign Turns 40” by David Sable. “It is the slogan for the United Negro College Fund that originated in 1972 when they teamed up with the US Ad Council to come up with a slogan.” The idea was to challenge young Negro students to be focused on the benefit of education. At the time when the slogan was adapted and emphasized, “The country was in the throes of wrenching social upheaval -- civil rights, the Vietnam War, the feminist awakening -- and views were both partisan and passionate.” Are people wasting their minds today? Are they desirous of stretching themselves in the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom? If these studies were applied to The Church, what is the mindset of churches today? Are they places where both knowledge of and wisdom from God is hallmark and being sought? Someone came up with an interesting study point: “Do we (the professing Christian) have an orientation to the narrow-mind or the narrow-way?

With concern for his mind, knowledge and wisdom, King Solomon stated: Ecclesiastes 7:23-25, “All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out? I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness.” His purpose and pursuit was and is correct. A reason why this is vital is in the area of motivation and accountability. In Jeremiah 11:20 is the recognition of a reality, “O Lord of hosts, who judges righteously, who tests the heart and the mind,” In Jeremiah 17:10, there is mention of an understanding of what God observes and what His intent is, “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” The safest place for one to guard, keep and develop the mind is shared in Isaiah 26:3-4, “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.” Consider these things with me.