Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

God lives in us

Sunday, May 24, 2009

1 John 4:12-16
No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

So much of love is simply acceptance. When I accept you as you are, when I accept the circumstances as they are, then I can avoid trying to change you and your world into a copy of mine. Who told me that I am always right? Who told any of us? I don't think that whisper is the voice of God.

God's whisper is not faint, but it's smudged and distorted by what I think I need. I don't need, first of all, all the blessings that my American Christianity tells me I deserve. I do need Jesus. I don't need to be free from pain. I do need Jesus. I don't need to be assured of a safe and healthy future. I do need Jesus.

When I am with Jesus, love is all there is. He loves me, and it's easy for me to share myself with whomever and whatever comes next. Actually, there is no "next," only the moment I am living through with Jesus. This phenomenon is not unusual; it can be my everyday relationship with God.

Why isn't it? What makes it seem so mysterious, the stuff of mystics in the desert? I'm struck by the following article excerpt from the NPR website about how near-death experiences seem to affect many people:

The 1990 movie Flatliners inspired Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, to ask people who have had near-death experiences to relive them while he looks to see what's happening in their head.

"And it seems that these people have a different sort of brain," Beauregard says in his soft French accent. "It's like there's a shift in their brain, and this shift will allow these people to stay in touch with the spiritual world more easily, on a daily basis."

Beauregard recruited 15 people who had a near-death experience. One of those was Gilles Bedard. In 1973, Bedard's heart stopped, and in the moments before he was resuscitated, he was greeted by what he describes as 12 beings of light.

"And I felt it was like the breath of the universe. Because it was like ..." he says as he blows out his breath, slowly, like a low wind, "very, very peaceful."

Since then, Bedard has meditated every day, and he says he often reconnects with the light. Beauregard's question is: what is happening in his brain?

For the experiment, Bedard is shut into an isolation chamber at Beauregard's Montreal lab. Bedard's head sprouts 32 electrodes, which will record his brain wave activity. He's told to relax for a few moments. Then he'll be instructed to imagine his near-death experience.

A few minutes later, Beauregard and his research assistant are peering at a computer screen recording Bedard's brain waves. They cluck happily at the slow, large-amplitude Delta waves undulating across the screen -- typical of a person in deep meditation or deep sleep. Afterward, the researcher asks Bedard if he was able to connect with the light.

"Yeah, it was coming from within," he says. "It was loving, intelligent ... very powerful."

It would take Beauregard a year to complete his research on near-death experiences. "It's like the near-death experience triggered something at a neural level in the brain,\ he said. "And perhaps this change, in terms of brain activity, is sort of permanent."

Beauregard says it's as if touching death jump-started the spiritual lives of these people. Their brains in the spiritual state look a lot like those of Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks who have spent tens of thousands of hours in prayer and meditation. Both groups showed extremely slow brain wave activity.

The researchers also saw significant changes in brain regions associated with positive emotions, attention and personal boundaries, as subjects who had had near-death experiences lost their sense of their physical bodies and merged with God or the "light."*

Suffering often allows us to let go, to surrender, to give way to Jesus. Whether I call him God or the Holy Spirit or Jesus, He lives in me. I am never alone. And like Bedard, I can learn how to flip a switch in my brain.

There is my usual comparison-oriented, self-centered, pre-occupied semi-conscious state of mind. And there is the moment that is taking place right now, during which I am neither attached to a desire about the future nor a memory from the past, when I know Jesus' presence and I am loved.

As high as the heavens are above the earth, Lord, so great is your love for those who fear you. As far as the east is from the west, so far have you removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so you have compassion on those who fear you. For you know how we are formed, you remember that we are dust. From everlasting to everlasting is your love.

* http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104397005

Devotions Archive

God lives in us

Sunday, May 24, 2009