Lessons from Rehab: reconnecting to the head

As I was in the rehab hospital I learned a lot. One of the things is that I learned is that after a spinal chord injury the nerves are disconnected. The brain is still sending signals but there is a break in the current. Also, the nerves to these areas still exist they just cant find each other. Let’s take moving your foot. If you keep thinking about moving your foot (sending the signal) while you also physically try to move your foot, sometimes using electric shock to move those muscles. You can in time reconnect some of those important nerves and use them again. This is the act of reconnecting to the head. This is the primary problem with a spinal cord injury. It also seems to be the biggest problem in the modern church today. We must reconnect to the Head of the body, we have to learn to obey him unconditionally. When we want to move our hand we just move it. The brain tells it to move, it moves. The hand does not ask why. It does not seek understanding. It does not make excuses. Why? Because the brain is king. It is the only body part with understanding.
The church has been commanded to go to the nations, yet we reason and spend years asking where, why when, etc. We have been commanded to love the poor and clothe and feed them, but we reason “they might take advantage of us if we do” , we have been told to be unified and not divisive, yet we just divide everytime we disagree about music, doctrine or practice. We must reconnect to the head and begin to obey. It is not our job to understand, it is our job to obey. True understanding usually comes only AFTER obedience!

The mouth:
Over the years while we have trained new missionaries, we often ask this simple question, “Who is in charge of the church?” We almost never receive a correct response! The answer always comes very confidently “the pastor!” This is coming from Americans, Indigenous peoples, Latin Americans, from varied educational backgrounds. The mouth has become the head of the church. Most pastors are great people, well-intentioned people of God. The problem is that they are inadequate for the task. They simply can not be all that the church expects of them.

It would be silly for me to just speak to my legs and hope they would start moving. The mouth is overrated. It manipulates sounds, that’s it. It is the brain that formulates the words. We have to stop putting our trust in body parts that are no more or less important than us. And reconnect to the head, he will teach us how to walk again. Then we can go and change our world.