Inception

I've been home for exactly a week now ~ with everything that's happened these last few days, I'm only now getting an opportunity to reflect on the mission in Brazil...

Tonight I went to see Inception, the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie about a thief who extracts secrets from within minds by entering into their defenseless subconscious minds in their dream state. As the plot develops, DiCaprio takes a job where he tries to implant an idea (called "inception") in order to get a person to act in a particular way as though the action was his own idea.

Thinking about the baseball clinic, as well as this movie, led me to compare the work of the Holy Spirit ~ through us, God's people ~ in the lives of others. We have this persistent sense that profession of faith, our salvation and our standing before God is something we do ourselves and something that we have to take care of. The truth, though, is that God "plants the seed" (inception) of faith, yet we act on it as though it was our own idea.

In Inception the "seeds" of the ideas implanted into the dreams of other people grow and influence the dreamer until that person's perception of reality is actually changed in his or her awakened state. Again, this is our evangelistic hope: that the seeds of faith planted by the Holy Spirit grow and influence the new believer until that person's reality is transformed in ways that affect his or her life and the lives of others.

That's how something as mundane as a baseball clinic can be spiritual and evangelistic - our prayer is that through a week's worth of daily contact with Believers, the seeds of faith have been implanted in children and adults who had been living their lives in dreams of their own construction ~ and that in time those dreamers will awaken to a new reality, "transformed by the renewing of their minds." Romans 12:2