Last night Tim and I watched the movie AVATAR. For those of you that have not seen it, it is worth seeing just on the beautiful photography/special effects and artwork. Think Fern Gully + Lord of the Rings + Star Wars + Dragon Riders of Pern. The main character is a young marine who has been crippled by war. His twin brother was a scientist working on a project on another planet; to infiltrate a tribe of the blue jungle people there to better understand them. A body that looks like one of theirs has been created from some of their DNA and his. By entering a sleep state in a special pod, he is able to up link his mind into the body. The sudden death of the twin brother makes the young marine uniquely qualified to take his bother’s place.
At first he is a white man in a blue man’s body. But bit-by-bit he learns to act and then think like a blue man. At one point, he says, “I have almost forgotten my old life.” What struck me after seeing the story is how like becoming a Christian this is. At first we are a sinner suddenly finding ourselves in a justified body. The fit is awkward. We want to act the way this body should, but we keep thinking like the old body. Bit-by-bit though the Holy Spirit teaches us how the new body should think. He teaches us the ways of the new tribe. As we learn we slowly begin to take on the ways of the new man, leaving the old man behind.
There is a faith principle and a scientific principle at work. One’s body actually starts to become what one “sees” oneself as. Often in healing we talk about, “seeing” oneself as healed and giving thanks for that before we have the healing manifested in our body. As we hold the image of our healed body in our mind, believing it to be done, the body actually begins to conform to the image that we hold. Even non-Christians are often able to appropriate this kind of image healing. God has so wonderfully linked our minds to our bodies that our bodies are limited or set free by the image that we hold in our mind.
I realized too this morning, that if I want to lose weight, I need to quit thinking of myself as a fat person and hold in my mind the image of a strong healthy slimmer person. I need to stop saying, “I am fat.” And think slim! No matter how few calories I eat, I am only starving a fat person. I need to be feeding a skinny person. Does this make sense to you? Well, I am going to try it, and I’ll get back to you on the results.
