The Power of an Image

A few years ago, I met a co-worker who had run into the building on a Sunday morning to pick up something. I happened to be there finishing a project, and we walked out together.  I noticed that he was flying Green Bay Packers flags on his car, and that team happened to be playing the Saints that day.  Whoa!  What was he thinking, driving around New Orleans with those flags?  I asked him if he had come from Wisconsin to N.O., but it turns out he was born in New Orleans. 

"How did you become a Green Bay fan?" I asked.  "When I was in the 3rd grade," he explained, "we had to draw football helmets for art class.  The one I picked to draw had this big G on the side.  Ever since then, I've been a Green Bay fan."

That encounter made me realize the power of an image to change our brains and emotions, and I thought back to a similar experience of my own.  When I was in the 8th grade, we had to draw one of a number of religious symbols for display in the hall outside our classroom.  I drew an antique oil lamp, the kind a genie emerges from, and somehow, I discovered in the process that the lamp represented wisdom.  That day, I fell in love with wisdom and began a life-long habit of praying for wisdom---even before I was sure I knew what wisdom was.  To this day, I pray daily for wisdom--and all because I drew a lamp in the 8th grade!

We know from brain research that images imprint physically on the brain.  Anything we gaze at for more than a few seconds will physically change the brain, to the point that we can actually see the image on the brain of a monkey who was euthanized while gazing at a pattern (see The Art of Changing the Brain for more information.)  If we cannot form an image of a process or a concept, we may be able to memorize a formula, but we will not be able to store it in long-term memory or comprehend meaning without the images.  Very simply, we think in images.

For years as I was growing up, I did not like the word "Grace," which I heard about all the time.  Now I know that since I could not form an image of Grace, I kept rejecting the concept.  I had nothing in my experience to connect to Grace, defined as "the unmerited favor of God."  Recently, though, I have come to see Grace as powerful energy flowing from God that changes us, sometimes dramatically (as in "Amazing" Grace), and sometimes gently and gradually, as the dawning of the sun in our souls.  I have experienced in my own life both types of grace--as churning water that runs turbines and as softly flowing water that gently carries one downstream.

God is always with us, and if He is present to us, His life-energy is communicated to us, just as friends communicate their life-energy in one another's presence.  We have only to drink in that amazing force to be renewed!