Excerpt from the book, Imagine the Future You
By Ada Brownell
IMAGINE YOUR MENTAL WEALTH
What you need to know and what you don’t want to know
You came into this life “empty-headed.”
When we were kids, my brother used to tell me he could look
into one of my ears and see out the other. Then I had an MRI (magnetic
resonance imaging) of my brain so I could do a firsthand story on the latest
technology.
I started the newspaper article with “My brother was wrong.
There is something in there.”
What I mean by “empty-headed” is that no stored information
existed in our brains when we came into this world. New brains are like a blank
sheet of paper, although fantastic stored data governing our neurological
systems and instincts operate even while we’re still in the womb. What God
“programmed” into us commanded our arms, legs, fingers, toes, and so forth to
move even before birth. Instincts God installed in our DNA prompted us to suck,
swallow, cry, and feel hunger, as well as caused the various inner parts of our
body to function. Babies arrive with a brain download to literally cry for
love, care, and being held, and they won’t thrive without these things.
When we were a few months of age, we learned to coordinate
movements so we could reach for things because our muscles and brains developed
that capacity.
Nevertheless, we all needed outside stimuli to use the
potential from the brain. Children who are given no attention often don’t learn
to sit, walk, or talk.
We learned our language skills by imitating. If Mom kept
saying “Mama” over and over to us, soon we worked our mouths and tongues
around, using our vocal cords so we could come up with a fairly good imitation.
Sometimes the child says “Dada” first and learns later what it means.
If the parents speak Chinese, the child obviously will learn
Chinese instead of English, and children of Spanish-speaking parents
communicate in Spanish or whatever language is spoken in the home.
All through childhood, children imitate what they see and
hear. Adults imitate other people—at least in some degree—all their lives. For
instance, we like to imitate the experts on everything from sports to dancing,
to gardening, to playing or singing music, to doing tricks on a bicycle or
skateboard.
But imitation isn’t all there is. At some point we think for
ourselves.
IMAGINE THINKING FOR YOURSELF
As children, we started thinking for ourselves when we
gagged and spit out the spinach baby food and then decided which cold cereal we
like best. If we were born into a poor Oriental family, we might like rice
instead. If we lived in an African slum, we’d be grateful for slimy oatmeal
gruel in a dirty bowl.
In some parts of the world, you’d think putting live bugs
between two slices of bread was a special treat, even though bugs crawled
around on your fingers as you ate them. In other countries you’d eat dog and
monkey. In times past it was quite common for Americans to eat cow and pig
brains and kidneys. They made “head cheese,” which was a meat jelly made from
the head of a calf or pig. You can still buy pickled pig’s feet. I don’t know if
they still sell head cheese but it became popular in a society that didn’t
waste anything. In hard times, people also ate squirrels and turtles.
You cringe at the thought. Your stomach turns. That’s
because you think for yourself and form an opinion.
Your head is not empty now. You learned by experience and
from other people. That’s the only way we assimilate knowledge.
After we learn something, we usually can recall it
spontaneously. We ride a bike without thinking about how we balance. We can
type, text, cook, clean, repair cars, and program computers. We balance
checkbooks, do income tax, use math to buy and sell, and make chemical formulas
to create medicines that save people’s lives or to invent guns, bombs, and
rockets to kill them. You can store billions of information blocks in your
memory.
According to Kenneth
Higbee, author of Your Memory and How it
Works and How to Improve it,[1]
your two-pound brain can store more than today’s most advanced computers.
Everything you put into your mind, especially what you
experience, changes you. You study to learn or pick up information from your
friends, your parents, or through the media, and you are affected.
IMAGINE BEING ON GUARD
I am choosy about what goes into my brain and hope you are,
too.
The Bible says when we have a close relationship with God,
He will guard our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus (Philippians
4:7). Yet, you decide whether or not to post that guard, the Holy Spirit, at
the door. If we listen to what our
conscience and scripture tells us, 24/7, and resist, Satan and his cohorts flee
in fear.
The Holy Spirit, through our conscience, convinces us of sin
(so we’ll know what it is), righteousness (so we’ll understand that), and
judgment (so we’ll know God will reward those who live for Him and punish those
who do not).[2]
It helps to think on things that are true, things that are
honorable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report.[3]
That means we are careful about what we read, what we watch on television, the
movies we go to or rent, and what activities we practice. We pray for His
wisdom and knowledge and actively reject smut, lust of the flesh, lust of the
eye, the pride of life, vulgar language, gossip, backbiting, and wrong
attitudes.
IMAGINE GREAT DOWNLOADS IN YOUR BRAIN
We also are able to
put some beautiful things in our brains: God’s Word, good music, good
information, a willingness to learn, a willingness to work, a determination to
love, a determination to help, a determination to make heaven our home.
Although His covenant is etched into our hearts, we still
need to study good things that “Ca-ching!” profitable character. We’re told in
the book of Timothy to study to show ourselves approved unto God, so we will
rightly interpret the Word of Truth.
But even if we memorize the Ten Commandments, such as “thou
shall not lie” or “thou shall not steal,” and “do not take the name of the Lord
thy God in vain,” we can turn away when Satan tempts.
If we use our excellent knowledge of good things, our
character and integrity grow. Our will becomes stronger. It’s like seeing a
growing baby every day. He looks the same size if we see him often, but if we
wait six months or a year, we see a big difference! And you and others will see
a change in you when you put positive things you learn into action.
When we make good decisions, we become more mature, more
trustworthy, more dependable, and our potential for doing great things
increases.
IMAGINE A STRONGER BRAIN GUARD
In addition to a spiritual guard over the brain, often we
need to reject evil that constantly crashes into the door of our mind and tries
to burst through.
Ungodly things we assimilate into our brains (even alcohol
or an illegal drug) can do things to our brains we can’t fathom.
Could be like what happened to Jones, my sister Clara’s Chihuahua,
a little darling dog who did tricks for Clara’s husband, Blackie. They would
put some glassless eyeglasses on Jonesy, as we called him, and he’d sit up,
take his front paws, and act as if he were reading a newspaper. He’d play dead
when Blackie pointed his finger and yelled, “Bang!”
Jonesy did all kinds of tricks and received his hamburgers
“made to order” and a human-style cookie for dessert, not doggie treats.
But one day he coughed, sneezed, and gagged all through the
night. He wouldn’t eat, and he continued coughing, sneezing, and gagging for
several days.
My sis thought Jones was dying, and she couldn’t bear
putting him to sleep. Her son was fighting a war, and he was attached to the
dog, too.
“We can’t let Jonesy die!” she said.
After about a week of the dog not eating, Jonesy gagged and
Clara noticed something in the back of his throat. A long blade of grass hung
down his throat and through his nose! She reached in and pulled it out. Jonesy
immediately got a drink of water and started eating and lived for several years
after that.
Sometimes a tiny amount of filth or ungodliness can give us
great grief.
If we are forced to read ungodly material, we can pray as we
read for God’s protection against our minds, but we can go even further. We can
go to the teacher or person in charge and say the book offends us and ask for a
substitute. Teachers usually provide something else, especially if you come
with a respectful attitude and your grades show you’re not just trying to get
out of something.
I obtained a substitute book in college when Hugh Hefner’s
biography was required reading. I didn’t want that stuff in my brain. When I
overheard another student say of the biography of the Playboy empire owner and
founder, “That’s really a raunchy book!” I knew it wasn’t for me.
A much more serious problem with our brains arises that’s
more difficult to talk about. Yes, we should respect those over us, but we also
need to be aware there is some brainwashing going on.
A THIEF AT THE DOOR
I am a graduate of a secular college and saw brainwashing
firsthand. Secular college professors often want to “reprogram” students who
have faith in a personal God. I encountered anti-God teaching in psychology
classes, a course on the environment, and even in music history classes. Mass
communications classes seemed to be saturated with obscenity and we spent most
of our time in the media law class studying obscenity law.
If you are a science major, changing your belief systems is
a top priority in a secular college.
In secular learning institutions, Christians often are
ridiculed, discriminated against, and even given lower grades or flunked if
they don’t embrace the theology of secularism.
Most colleges and universities promote a one-world
government, teach against freedom and capitalism, and work to make secularism
everyone’s religion and the earth their God.
Today, the progressive political system and secularists, and
even other religions, are inserting anti-Christian and ungodly doctrines into
public school education to brainwash out the Christian teaching implanted by
the church and parents. You make up your mind whether to reject it.
IMAGINE RECALL
One thing we learn about our brain is once we put something
into it, it’s there for recall. Sometimes the things you try the hardest to
forget are the ones that stick. That’s why we need to be careful what we put
into our heads.
IMAGINE BRAINWASHING
Webster’s New World
Dictionary says brainwashing is “to indoctrinate so intensively and
thoroughly as to effect a radical transformation of beliefs and mental
attitudes.”
In other words, to brainwash you is to change not only how
you think, but also what you think. Furthermore, if you are brainwashed, it
changes who you are.
Armies who keep prisoners of war often brainwash one person
at a time, but communists and Nazis brainwashed entire societies. In America,
we not only have brainwashing in institutions of learning, but it’s done by
gangs, politicians, and the media. Gangs and governments can brainwash you so
thoroughly you’ll kill your brother, grandmother, or mother.
The media brainwashes
you by portraying the majority of Christians as crooks and adulterers. A few
high-profile ministers have been great sinners, but if they break God’s laws,
they are no longer Christians in God’s sight.
The media rarely mention powerful things accomplished by
Christians and Jews. Christian charities have housed and fed the homeless and
hungry around the world for centuries. Missionaries often bring feeding
programs, build orphanages, and offer free health care and medicine when they
go to tell the world about Jesus. Christians are there, too, when disaster
strikes.
Religion was the reason people learned to read. Since the
Middle Ages, there has been near-universal literacy among Jewish men because
they were required to read the Torah by age thirteen.
In the early church, Christians copied the apostles’
writings by hand, as was done meticulously for centuries with Old Testament
scriptures, with everything being continually checked and rechecked for accuracy.
That is what the scribes did. With the Protestant Reformation came a desire for
everyone to read scripture. Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing
press, and the first book printed was the Gutenberg Bible.
According to the Encyclopedia
Americana, education in colonial New England grew out of the Reformation as
well. Puritans made sure their children could read the Bible. In the Middle
Colonies, religious sects birthed early schools. In the Southern Colonies,
parents tutored their children or educated them in a private school, often so
they could read God’s Word. In New England, teachers got their jobs because of
their soundness in the faith. The home and church provided most education until
the early 1900s.
Universities and colleges were started by religious
organizations: Harvard to train preachers; Yale for training in church work,
civil duties, the arts and sciences; Vanderbilt for teaching law, medicine,
theology, and the arts; Baylor was the fruit of the Baptist General Convention;
Boston University was started by Methodists for training in theology; Boston
College was Catholic, as was Fordham; Cornell College was Methodist; Rutgers
University for eighty years included the New Brunswick Theological Seminary of
the Reformed Church of America. Universities were established by other
denominations and religious organizations that included biblical training as
well.
Christians are still
educating the world. Wycliffe Bible Translators live with primitive tribes and
give them a written language and teach them to read. Wycliffe translated the
Bible into hundreds of languages and brought literacy to many nations. Through
its Last Languages Campaign, Wycliffe’s translators hope to have the 2,200 last
languages translated by the year 2025. Currently, Wycliffe has 1,400
translation literacy and language development programs, touching nearly six
hundred million people in 176 countries.
Beyond that, Jews and the church birthed most of the
hospitals in our nation.
Christians visit those in prison, mental hospitals, and
nursing homes; care for orphans; and speak for those who can’t speak for
themselves, such as infants in the womb.
Churches teach children to obey their parents—then they
provide wholesome activities for youth, mostly for no charge. They teach marriage
and parenting classes, provide grief support, and offer recovery groups for
alcoholics and others—without charge.
Christians will come to our side when we’re dying and
comfort those left behind.
THE USE OF PROPAGANDA
Those who brainwash use propaganda, which aims to accomplish
a systematic changing of your beliefs, practices, and ideas. It’s similar to
how some journalists and politicians “spin” facts, spinning the listener’s mind
away from the truth, convincing the audience to believe a lie.
The most successful propaganda usually always has some truth
in it. If it were all lies, most people would resist it.
“For a long time propagandists have recognized that lying
must be avoided,” says Jacques Ellul, author of Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.[4]
“In propaganda, truth pays off.”
Where propaganda goes to work to change minds is in the
“interpretation” of the truth, or the “slant” placed on the truth.
Ellul’s book says in France between 1921 and 1936, the
Communist Party made progress because of election propaganda, and the same was
true for the Nazi Party during 1929 and 1933.
Mao Tse-tung said propaganda can “force” people to become
Marxist. His first techniques failed, but then he went to public discussion,
criticism, persuasion, and Marxist education, especially for children, and he
turned China to his way of thinking.
This was in spite of Mao executing an estimated two to five
million people and sending several million to labor camps.
To have the greatest
effect, propaganda must base itself on existing tendencies, Ellul said,[5]
and not go against ingrained attitudes. Instead of going against what you
believe, it gives you something else to believe—using your own desires and
needs as a basis. Without knowing it, your attitudes are replaced.
Ellul said preexisting attitudes fade quickly in real
propaganda campaigns, which surround people from morning to night, childhood to
old age, in all they read and hear, without giving them rest or a moment to
pause, think, or catch their breath.[6]
Dave Roever, a US Navy SEAL who served in Vietnam, in his
book, Scarred,[7]
tells how he was trained by the Navy to resist propaganda should he ever be
taken prisoner.
“They took all our clothes away from us and left us standing
naked and shivering in the cold rain while they issued tattered, ruined old
World War II `greens,’” recalled Roever
“We were forced into formation for inspection, and then beaten because a
button was missing. We were given hard labor because a zipper wasn’t zipped,
when it wasn’t even there.”
They put him in a box
the size of a baby coffin, in a sitting position.
“Three or four men forced me into a folded position, my face
on my knees, and they hammered the lid on the box. For many hours I remained in
the box. They would come with large chains and beat on it. The sound was
horrific. I went numb from my waist to my feet.”
The trainers continued
the torture, and every time they stopped, Roever smiled. One officer became so
angry, he struck Roever with his fist and knocked the young trainee’s teeth
through his lower lip.
The men were starved, shown food, then the “pretend” captors
did despicable things to what had been served—before they threw it in the dirt.
Eventually, machine guns firing blanks erupted out in the
bushes, US troops clothed in full uniform and carrying American guns came in,
and the exercise was over. The trainees shredded the North Vietnamese flag that
had been flying over the compound and sent up the American flag while a bugler
played “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
The training exercise had been tough, and Roever wondered
what it would be like to be captured by the Vietcong.
Roever was not captured by the enemy, but he underwent even
greater challenges when a phosphorous grenade exploded in his hand one day in
Vietnam, blowing off his face, several fingers, and an ear, and severely
damaging an eye and his chest. The battle he fought was not only to live, but
also to want to live and to fulfill God’s call on his life.
Today Roever is a preacher who goes back to Vietnam with humanitarian
missions and hopes someday to win that nation for Christ. He also has a program
for wounded soldiers in Colorado.
Today you need to be aware some people and organizations
would like to brainwash you. We need to actively resist. Roever did, and he
came out smiling.
When someone is trying to steal your faith, mentally say
“reject, reject.” Dave Roever had his name, rank, and serial number to answer
every attempt by his interrogators to bend his will and force him to reveal
military secrets. Christians have hundreds of scripture verses that not only
will help us to resist but also send the enemy, Satan, to flight.
“Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7) is
one example of these scriptures.
IMAGINE YOU IN BATTLE
Now, when you’re young, is the time to fill your brain with
things that will help you in the future. Your youth is similar to basic
training, because much of what you learn won’t be used until you reach the
battles of adulthood.
But if you invite Him to, God will be there to help you in
the difficult choices you need to make. Basic training in the military shows
young men how to make split-second decisions that save lives or a nation. Basic
training helps them build bodies so strong they can build bridges in hours, dig
trenches for cover in minutes, and stand against the enemy for days with almost
no sleep or food.
Learning all you can now will make you strong enough to
stand up to Satan and his devices and not only save your own soul, but lead
others to freedom through Jesus Christ. But you’ll need the whole armor of God
described in Ephesians 6:10–18: the helmet of salvation, the belt of truth, the
breast plate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the sword of the spirit
(God’s Word), and feet fitted with readiness of the Gospel of peace.
Submitting to God’s love for us and His plan for our lives
will give us the greatest joy that can be achieved on this earth. You might
have heard of the biblical “Joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8)
and the “rivers of living water” (John 7:38 that will flow through you.
But that’s not all.
Accepting salvation through Jesus Christ, who died for us, will give us eternal
life, and our souls will never die.
That’s the most important information of all to put into our
brain’s memory system.
[1]
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc.,1977, 1.
[2] John
16:7–9
[3]
Philippians 4:8
[4] New
York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1973. 53.
[5] Propaganda,
279.
[6] Ibid. 280.
[7] Scarred (Fort Worth, Texas: Roever
Communications, 1995), 26.
IMAGINE
THE FUTURE YOU (Summary)
By
Ada Brownell
Will you be the person you dream of becoming, or the person
in your nightmares?
Ready or not, you are headed into your future.
Would you like to achieve your dreams of being
all you can be inside and out? Would you like to deposit good information in
your brain you can spend and invest in your future?
Read or listen to Ada Brownell’s book, Imagine
the Future You.
This author, who taught church youth for more than 30
years, spent a good hunk of her life as a journalist interviewing successful
people who achieved great things, but also met and wrote about those whose
lives had become so entangled with baggage they needed a miracle to turn them
loose. In addition, she has picked brains and studied how to believe in
yourself and things greater than you.
You need this book. E-book, paper and audible. Great narrator.
Mom: Our teenage daughter loves this book!
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