If you've ever seen The Butterfly Effect or have heard of the concept, you know that it's been theorized that even the smallest choice now can have a tremendous impact later. Tim Keller has a really intriguing example of this in a sermon called "Does God Control Everything?" This blog post summarizes how Keller ended up where he is now.
It would be interesting to make a thread about how you may have seen the butterfly effect at play in your life, but this thread is more specific than that. There's a new podcast out called Invisibilia. It is all about various invisible phenomena in our lives and how we are affected by them. The most recent podcast began with an explanation of an experiment that was conducted by research psychologist Bob Rosenthal. In the experiment he purchased multiple lab rats and hung signs above their cages indicating that they were either smart or dumb. Then he brought in a group of experimenters, gave them each a rat, and told them that their job was to run their rat through a maze. The result was that the "smart" rats performed almost twice as well as the "dumb" rats did even though they were all completely regular, normal rats. The explanation for this is that because the experimenters had certain expectations for their rat, they touched or handled them differently depending on their expectation.
The rest of the podcast is devoted to the story of a man named Daniel Kish. Due to cancer, Daniel's eyes were surgically removed when he was an infant and he was destined to be blind for the rest of his life. Daniel's grandmother suggested to his mother that she wrap him up in lots of padding so he can't get hurt, but instead she decided to let him be free to do whatever he put his mind to. He actually started climbing before he could even walk, and as much as it terrified his mother, she continued to let him. As he grew, he also developed the ability to navigate the world around him by clicking with his mouth and judging where he was at in relation to objects around him based on how it sounded, a skill known as echolocation. (This is how bats, who have terrible eyesight, get around without running into things as well.) His teachers asked his mom to get him to stop climbing because it was dangerous and to stop clicking because it was socially odd, but she continued to let him do both. Eventually he was even able to ride a bicycle. He had some accidents from time to time, but she continued to let him figure things out for himself.
At school, there was another blind boy who was much more handicapped than Daniel. He had attended a school for the blind where people basically did everything for him, even leading him around by the arm to get from room to room. Because of that he had a really difficult time getting around on his own. This frustrated Daniel because the kids started lumping the two of them together even though he was much more capable of navigating the world around him than his classmate.
At one point during his adulthood, a neurologist, intrigued by Daniels abilities, did some scans of his brain as an object was held up in front of him, sometimes still and sometimes moving. There are various parts of the brain that control various aspects of our vision from color to movement to brightness. What she found was that the parts of Daniel's brain responsible for his vision fired the same way that the brain of someone with perfectly working eyes would fire. They likened his "visual" acuity to the peripheral vision of a person with normal sight. You can see objects moving but you wouldn't be able to read a sign or something similar. Similar scans were done on other blind people who had been given a lot of help as Daniel's elementary school classmate was, and the visual parts of their brain didn't fire at all. It was like a part of them had been lost.
The conclusion of this experiment: Eyes aren't a requirement to be able to see. How crazy is that?! Daniel now coaches other blind children to use echolocation so that they can function like normal human beings as well.
One last story: This one isn't as long, but it is about a boy named Jacob Barnett. He was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism at the age of 2, and his parents were told that he would not be able to speak or tie his shoes. It was recommended to them that they put him in a special education program where he would be taught to carry out basic life skills so that he could life his life with some degree of normalcy.
His parents didn't accept that their son's destiny was to be handicapped for the rest of his life, so they decided to "teach" him themselves. Similar to Daniel Kish's mother, Jacob's parents let him go after the things that interested him the most, and what they discovered was that he was more intelligent than anyone could have imagined.
Jacob now has an IQ of 170, higher than Albert Einstein's. He was enrolled at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis at age 10 and is now a doctoral student studying astrophysics and quantum mechanics. He's a published scientific researcher and an aspiring author and entrepreneur. He has said that he may one day disprove Einstein's Theory of Relativity and has been predicted to one day be a Nobel Prize winner if he can manage to solve one or more of the most difficult problems in astrophysics that he has been working on.
All of these stories are true because someone believed in their child when no one else would. Someone had a vision for these boys that eventually blossomed into mind-blowing skill and ability when everyone else had the most minor of expectations for them.
I say all of that to say this. God has created us to glorify Himself, and He has created each of us with the ability to do that. He has given us brains that can do things that are unparalleled in technology and bodies that can do a lot more than we think. The purpose of this thread is for you to ponder and reflect on these questions:
How have others in your life failed to believe in you in the past? How has that potentially held you back?
How have others believed in you? How has that propelled you forward?
In what ways might you just be scratching the surface of your talent or skill in something? In what ways could you possibly unleash your own individual creativity to contribute to something that has never been there before?
Some of these might be more hypothetical, but feel free to answer any or all of them that you feel led to answer. You are capable of a lot more than you think. All it takes is a little belief.
It would be interesting to make a thread about how you may have seen the butterfly effect at play in your life, but this thread is more specific than that. There's a new podcast out called Invisibilia. It is all about various invisible phenomena in our lives and how we are affected by them. The most recent podcast began with an explanation of an experiment that was conducted by research psychologist Bob Rosenthal. In the experiment he purchased multiple lab rats and hung signs above their cages indicating that they were either smart or dumb. Then he brought in a group of experimenters, gave them each a rat, and told them that their job was to run their rat through a maze. The result was that the "smart" rats performed almost twice as well as the "dumb" rats did even though they were all completely regular, normal rats. The explanation for this is that because the experimenters had certain expectations for their rat, they touched or handled them differently depending on their expectation.
The rest of the podcast is devoted to the story of a man named Daniel Kish. Due to cancer, Daniel's eyes were surgically removed when he was an infant and he was destined to be blind for the rest of his life. Daniel's grandmother suggested to his mother that she wrap him up in lots of padding so he can't get hurt, but instead she decided to let him be free to do whatever he put his mind to. He actually started climbing before he could even walk, and as much as it terrified his mother, she continued to let him. As he grew, he also developed the ability to navigate the world around him by clicking with his mouth and judging where he was at in relation to objects around him based on how it sounded, a skill known as echolocation. (This is how bats, who have terrible eyesight, get around without running into things as well.) His teachers asked his mom to get him to stop climbing because it was dangerous and to stop clicking because it was socially odd, but she continued to let him do both. Eventually he was even able to ride a bicycle. He had some accidents from time to time, but she continued to let him figure things out for himself.
At school, there was another blind boy who was much more handicapped than Daniel. He had attended a school for the blind where people basically did everything for him, even leading him around by the arm to get from room to room. Because of that he had a really difficult time getting around on his own. This frustrated Daniel because the kids started lumping the two of them together even though he was much more capable of navigating the world around him than his classmate.
At one point during his adulthood, a neurologist, intrigued by Daniels abilities, did some scans of his brain as an object was held up in front of him, sometimes still and sometimes moving. There are various parts of the brain that control various aspects of our vision from color to movement to brightness. What she found was that the parts of Daniel's brain responsible for his vision fired the same way that the brain of someone with perfectly working eyes would fire. They likened his "visual" acuity to the peripheral vision of a person with normal sight. You can see objects moving but you wouldn't be able to read a sign or something similar. Similar scans were done on other blind people who had been given a lot of help as Daniel's elementary school classmate was, and the visual parts of their brain didn't fire at all. It was like a part of them had been lost.
The conclusion of this experiment: Eyes aren't a requirement to be able to see. How crazy is that?! Daniel now coaches other blind children to use echolocation so that they can function like normal human beings as well.
One last story: This one isn't as long, but it is about a boy named Jacob Barnett. He was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism at the age of 2, and his parents were told that he would not be able to speak or tie his shoes. It was recommended to them that they put him in a special education program where he would be taught to carry out basic life skills so that he could life his life with some degree of normalcy.
His parents didn't accept that their son's destiny was to be handicapped for the rest of his life, so they decided to "teach" him themselves. Similar to Daniel Kish's mother, Jacob's parents let him go after the things that interested him the most, and what they discovered was that he was more intelligent than anyone could have imagined.
Jacob now has an IQ of 170, higher than Albert Einstein's. He was enrolled at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis at age 10 and is now a doctoral student studying astrophysics and quantum mechanics. He's a published scientific researcher and an aspiring author and entrepreneur. He has said that he may one day disprove Einstein's Theory of Relativity and has been predicted to one day be a Nobel Prize winner if he can manage to solve one or more of the most difficult problems in astrophysics that he has been working on.
All of these stories are true because someone believed in their child when no one else would. Someone had a vision for these boys that eventually blossomed into mind-blowing skill and ability when everyone else had the most minor of expectations for them.
I say all of that to say this. God has created us to glorify Himself, and He has created each of us with the ability to do that. He has given us brains that can do things that are unparalleled in technology and bodies that can do a lot more than we think. The purpose of this thread is for you to ponder and reflect on these questions:
How have others in your life failed to believe in you in the past? How has that potentially held you back?
How have others believed in you? How has that propelled you forward?
In what ways might you just be scratching the surface of your talent or skill in something? In what ways could you possibly unleash your own individual creativity to contribute to something that has never been there before?
Some of these might be more hypothetical, but feel free to answer any or all of them that you feel led to answer. You are capable of a lot more than you think. All it takes is a little belief.
