Annual Report 2012 – compressed - York St Church of Christ

FEARFULLY & WONDERFULLY MADESalt and Pepper ArticleTHE HEAD OF THE BODYPart Two of TwoCharles Plum was a jet fighter pilot in Vietnam. After his75 th combat mission his plane was hit by a surface-toairmissile forcing him to eject and to parachute intoenemy hands. He survived six years in a Communistprison, before his release when he became amotivational speaker, lecturing about his experiences.One day he was sitting with his wife in restaurant whena man from the opposite table got up and walked overfighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.That night Plum could not sleep as he wondered abouthow that man would have looked in his Navy uniform: aDixie-cup hat, a bib in the back and bell bottommight have seen him on the Kitty Hawk, and passed himby without even speaking with him, because, you see, Iimagined the man spending many hours in the bowelsof the ship carefully weaving shrouds and folding thesilks of each chute, especially the chute which saved hisEvery part of the Body is important. This true storyillustrates what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians about thebody being a unit made up of many parts such as limbs,organs and cells. He makes it clear that the sum of themany parts makes up one body and that it makes nodifference whether the part is visible or clothed, higherto hear. We know that our olfactory senses are capableof discriminating 10,000 different odours and detectingone garlic molecule from the smell of 50,000 othermolecules. Messages, whether from the ear, nose,tongue or fingertips are changed into much higher levelsof meaning, thanks to the amazing capacity of oursecluded brain. Every sensation that we experience,every piece of data that we receive from our senseorgans, terminates in that ivory fortress. Nothing hasmeaning until our brain, which is made of edible meat,takes hold of it, and translates it into a sense either ofsmell, taste or vision.describes another amazing function of the brain. Hein from the various organs of the body and sendingmessages out to the extremities. In the entire brain, onlyone in one thousand cells will report in from theextremities: all visual images, sounds, all touch and painsensations, all smells, the monitors of blood pressure andchemical changes, the sensation of hunger, thirst,muscular tension, occupy only 0.001 % or one-tenth ofone percent of the brains cells! Our very selective brainsadmit just a few hundred messages out of one hundredmillion. Another two-tenths of one percent of cells controlall motor activities: the motions of playing a pianoconcerto, speaking a language, dancing a ballet, typing atogether in an intercommunication system that allowsanother process to happen we know it as thought andwill!Sometimes the body will need healing. As the physicalbody can sometimes get sick, so the Body of Christ canbecome ill, causing disconnection and dissensionmight consider itself to be more important than another.members of the church can suffer from disconnection toone another. He describes people who become legalistic,am not elegant like you, embellished with rings, I guess Iof the body is fearfully and wonderfully made. Forexample, when a friend talks to us, molecules vibrateand move our eardrum one ten thousandth of acentimetre before that mechanical energy is convertedto electrical current and fired along thousands of wiresor neurons- to the auditory part of our brain, enabling us36has seen in others, and his unspiritual mind puffs him upwith idle notions. He has lost connection with the-a theological word for such poisons in the Body: sin. Sinsteals into the intimate channel between Head andmember, interrupting communication and separating thecell from the higher authority that directs and coordinatesits actions. If a prophetic cell refuses to warn the rest of