What is the Source of Your Energy?

Energy -- the mark of all living things.  Even music, not necessarily a living thing, emits energy.  Yesterday, as I worked at the computer, I noticed how different the background music affected me.  Some of the music energized me; some of it softened my energy and made me feel warm, peaceful, and romantic.  Some of the songs brought a feeling of nostalgia and yearning for something I couldn't even define. 

Trees, rocks, mountains, lakes -- all exert a kind of energy on the world at large as well as on us as individuals.  Cityscapes also bring their own kinds of energy--that is why many cities have begun to establish town greens, civic sculptures, and restored building, all of which help to offset the negative energies that tend to go with city life: noise, traffic, bustle, trash, over-crowding, depressing lack of color and freshness, etc. 

In the wonderful documentary called "I Am," Shadyac, the producer of films such as Bruce Almighty and Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, asks the question, "What is wrong with our world?"  The answer is "I Am."  The whole point of his film is to transform the question and answer to "What is right with our world?" / "I Am."

Every human being projects some kind of energy into the world around him.  Some human energy is renewing and refreshing, like that of nature itself.  Some people, on the other hand, emit a kind of negative energy that either drives others away, depresses the people around them, or consumes the good energy of others like a black hole in space.  Anger and seething resentment, even when masked, cannot be hidden; people sense that kind of energy and seek to get away from it.  Hostility toward others, jealousy, desire to be seen as better than others, fear of failure -- all communicate themselves toward other people, whether we wish it or not.

One of my favorite Scripture passages is Proverbs 4:23:  Guard well your heart, for out of it flow all the issues of life.  I don't think anyone can contest the absolute truth of that statement:  everything in life flows from the kind of energy stored up in the core of our personalities.  The friends or associates we make, the person we marry, the jobs we do, any of life's achievements -- all begin and depend upon the core of our being, what the Bible calls the "heart" or "spirit" of man. 

The heart is not the "soul," the part of of us the Greeks called "Psyche," or the mind and emotions.  We are much more than the contents of our minds and emotions.  There is something even deeper in us that remains even when our emotions go wild or shut down, even when our minds diminish through Altziemer's or brain damage -- we are still precious, eternal beings whose value is not lessened in the eyes of God, even if the earth sees it differently.  The Downs Syndrome child has a pure heart; the great scholar and intellect may not. 

So then, what kind of energy animates our lives?  What kind of energy do we project to the world around us?  Twenty-five or thirty years ago, Russian scientists were experimenting with different ways to increase productivity in their crops.  One team of scientists "discovered" that using perlite (I think that's right) in the soil would dramatically increase corn productivity.  In trying to replicate the experiment with other teams, no results at all could be obtained.  They sent the original team back into the field, however, and they were able to re-create the original results.  Finally, the Russians had to conclude that the corn was responding to the energy of the experimenters, not to the perlite. 

I know this sounds very "New Age," and most people will scoff at such a ridiculous theory.  However, American scientists some years ago were baffled by the results of experiments with light waves or particles (it's still hard to tell what light really is).  They consistently noted that they got different results in their experiment depending on whether observers were present in the room or not.  And Einstein himself was stunned to discover that the world did not operate entirely according to the laws of Newtonian physics.  For some years, he abandoned his research because of mysterious and unexplainable results:  "God does not play dice with the universe," he said.  Finally, another scientist brought Einstein's theories to the conclusion he himself could not accept -- what we now call "Chaos Theory."

There is no question in my mind that our spiritual energy affects the world around us.  If we are spiritually healthy, so is the world; if we are spiritually starving, so is the world.  The Lion King movie was, to me, a wonderful illustration of that truth.  And now, The Lorax has done it again.  Man indeed, does "have dominion" over the earth, as the Bible says.  What we have failed to realize is that our kingdom, our dominion, flows from our hearts:  As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.  This is not about the power of positive thinking; it is about the Source of our energy.  We ourselves do not create energy; we receive it from another source.  If we think we are the center of the universe, our enegy is sadly limited to our own resources.  But if we are willing to receive the Unlimited Energy that comes from Christ, Who receives everything from the Father, His energy in us can renew the earth.