A couple days ago my reading plan had me going through Matthew 11. Lots of stuff in there: John the Baptist sending a delegation of disciples to check if Jesus really was the Messiah; Jesus praising John the Baptist; Jesus commenting on how people talked smack about John for being too strict and about him because he was supposedly too loose; Jesus not praising some Galilean towns where he did miracles but people didn’t respond to him and then finally his statement about the tired and weary coming to him and finding rest.

Tucked into this chapter, in three verses, is the truth that intersected with my other reading: “At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’” (v.25-27, NIV).

People who study religious belief and faith in God have known for years that it’s much easier for a child to grasp and believe the truth about Jesus than it is for adults. According to Christian pollster George Barna (www.barna.org), about half of all Americans who ask Christ into their lives as savior do so before their teenage years (43%). Two-thirds of born-again Christians (64%) made that decision before they turned 18 and one of eight made a profession of faith between 18 and 21. These figures have stayed pretty constant in the twenty years Barna has studied Christian conversion.

But now enter the world of science. One of the books at my bedside the last couple months has been Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions. This is the autobiographical story of Susan Barry, a neurobiology professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. It is not a spiritual book, but a personal book with a scientific context.

Fixing My Gaze

For the first 50 years of her life Barry could only see in two dimensions. She used other cues to figure out if something was near or far, say the height of an object compared to other objects in her view i.e. the bigger something was, the closer; smaller, than farther. But she had no sense of the space between things, near to far, up to down. Her other senses worked fine: she could feel three dimensions, smell, hear, taste, but as far as vision, everyone was a Flat Patrick . . . or Flat Annie or Flat Joey or flat microwave or flat map. Well, all maps are flat, but you get the point.

In her 40s Barry started experiencing new problems with her sight which led eventually to the office of Dr. Theresa Ruggiero, a developmental optometrist who specializes in vision therapy. Long story short: through the exercises she learned from Dr. Ruggiero, Barry’s eyesight transformed and suddenly she entered the strange and exciting world of sight that most of the rest of us take for granted. Barry’s eyes “opened” in a new way to grasp the wonder and beauty of creation, even in very simple things like snow falling, or the complexity of layers of tree branches. Barry’s joy in such sights is enough reason to read the book all by itself.

While Barry discovered that change is possible for adults, she did learn there is a difference in receptivity to change.  She notes, “An infant nervous system may change its connections in response to any stimulus as along as it is very strong or repeated sufficiently” (p. 158). She cites an experiment with barn owls whose vision is altered with prisms. Barn owls use both hearing and seeing to hunt. The study showed that young barn owls automatically made adjustments to the conflicting data between their ears and eyes, whether they were being fed or forced to hunt. Adult barn owls would only make the adjustment if they had to hunt. Based on this and other studies, and her own experience, Barry concludes that the adult brain can be rewired, but only if there’s a significant behavioral motivation. And that takes me back to the Gospel.

By the time we get to adulthood our thinking is pretty well fixed about what’s important in life and how to best function. It takes something significant to get us to think otherwise or to consider a different point of view. My friend Mark said that his mother’s death when he was in his late 20s opened his mind to search for answers about the meaning of life and whether there was an afterlife. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God has set “eternity in the hearts of men.” We have this vague notion that somehow we are eternal beings and that our deepest needs will only be satisfied by something eternal. But instead, we choose to fill the endless void with the temporary and ultimately unsatisfying. It takes something big to knock us loose of this way of functioning.  

The New Testament book of Romans, chapter 1, verse 20, indicates that evidence of the existence of God is plenty available to anyone willing to look closely at creation. But, instead of acknowledging God, we would rather bury this evidence in the back of our minds somewhere and not deal with it. Or we actively seek to cover up the evidence with “worship” of anything but God – money, things, other people, career – and orient ourselves around this other thing instead of the Lord who made us.

In John 16, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit is working on the hearts and minds of every person in the world to convince them that they have done wrong, that their standard of goodness is not the same as God’s, and that there is a judgment for the gap between our goodness and God’s. It does matter. However, it takes the Holy Spirit to help adults see that the coming judgment is “behaviorally important stimuli” to borrow Barry’s phrasing.

To turn from our sophisticated adult pursuits and look to God for answers appears to us as “childish.” The “wise and learned” don’t really get the Gospel. Its old-timey, simplistic, archaic. But children don’t perceive the Gospel through that lens. They have open hearts and minds to hear the story of Christ as it is – the story of God’s incredible act of love toward mankind – without all kinds of American cultural baggage attached to it. If we can suspend our pre-judgments for just 10 minutes or so and read Jesus’ story and hear what the writers were saying something marvelous may happen – God may reveal his secrets to us. We may discover something that is not only satisfying to our emotions and spirits but also to our minds. We might gain a new level of sight, a 4-dimensional vision really, that gives genuine depth and fullness to our 3D lives.