“Home is where the suitcase is.”
That’s what I’ve been telling people lately. Living out of a suitcase has it’s ups and downs, advantages and disadvantages. For the past three weeks, home has been in Texas, sweaty and tiresome. It’s been a time of discovery and revelation. For one thing, I found out that I’m stronger than I thought I was. I’d started running regularly just a mile or two every day or so. Down in the heat of south Texas, my cohort Ryan had an insane idea.
“Let’s try to run 5K,” he said.
“It’ll be fun,” he said. Despite all the factors that seemed to point to it being a bad idea, I consented. Who cares that it’s about 100 degrees outside? Who cares I’ve never run that far in my entire life? And off we went. By the end, we had surprised ourselves. I was first surprised that I had been hydrated enough to sweat a gallon and stay on my feet. I was even more surprised that what had once seemed highly unlikely without excessive training on my reconstructed knee, had actually been so close within my reach all along.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve learned the value of a great many things…the value of family, of love, of dedication, of prayer, and of perseverance. As Ryan and I prepared a presentation called Thrills and Chills, a startling revelation emerged. The body of evidence pointed out that the greatest factor, both in our ability to process and handle pain and pleasure, is the mind. In one study, while doing a brain activity scan, they had the subjects drink wine. One group was shown an image reflecting that they were drinking an expensive wine, while the other group was shown an image reflecting that they were drinking an ordinary wine. Those who saw that they had an expensive wine experienced more pleasure than those that was they had an ordinary one, but the shocking thing is that they both drank the exact same wine. The definitive parameters for the experiment were exactly the same, except that one group thought they had something special, and because of that, they actually experienced greater pleasure.
What if we took that seriously?
What if we actually lived our lives, recognizing that what we believe about what we experience completely changes the nature of the experience? What if we found out that we could run a 5K in 100˚weather if we just tried, even though we’d never done it before? What if we found out that “impossible” is just a word? What every you set your mind to do entirely changes the nature of what you will experience. Life’s trials an vicissitudes will continue from here to heaven. Pain and pleasure are constants, but what we believe about them will definitively change how we experience them.
Our journey continues, but I pray we all take time to reflect. Thank you to everyone who has been supporting us this far along the way. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to see it yet, my wife and I put together this music video “Everywhere I Go.” Click the image below to see it. Enjoy, and be blessed. God is with you, everywhere you go.
If you would be interested in hearing more of the amazing facts about the power of the mind over experiences of the body, head over to the website of my ministry, UnScene Media and join the mailing list. We’ll be editing the footage of the Thrills and Chills presentation and uploading it, and we’ll send out a message as soon as it is up.
