Sunday, October 19, 2025

Products of our childhood

I was reading the results of a study on people who faced difficult aftermaths following an NDE (near-dear experience) and I thought, “But I would love to know what that’s like.”

(Note: The journalist in me can’t resist giving you at least a few findings. From Study Finds: “More than one in five participants said their relationships with family, friends, or people in general got worse after the experience. Another 22% reported a divorce or breakup . . . Researchers describe the period after a near-death experience as ‘reentry problems,’  a kind of culture shock. Imagine tasting perfect peace and love, then waking to traffic, bills, and petty arguments . . .  Many wrestle with what one researcher called ‘the perceived triviality of their life or the problems they were facing before the NDE.’ The sense of unconditional love becomes a sharp contrast to ordinary life. Some feel anger or depression at having returned to what felt like ‘home’  only to find themselves back here. ‘I just feel awake to reality, but alone in that knowledge,’ one participant wrote.”)

With a couple of days off work last week, I knew I needed to get a pair of New Balance 990s that my foot doctor recommended. I had already gone to our neighborhood shoe store (an official dealer of New Balance) to learn they didn’t have my size (11 ½) and that it would be two weeks if they ordered them, so I looked online and saw there was a New Balance factory outlet store in Sunbury, OH.

This was the little town we always looked forward to getting to by car during my childhood growing up an hour north in the little resort/farming village of Loudonville, OH.

It’s where we finally could get on I-71 S and knew we were almost to Columbus. We would sometimes stop at the giant McDonalds just below the interstate's entrance ramp and go to the bathroom and buy a sandwich and drink on Sunday afternoons following church (the old First Baptist in downtown Loudonville) and quickly going home to change out of our dress clothes before getting on the road. All there really was at the time besides the McDonald’s was a Wendy’s and a few gas stations. Now, as I was astonished to see, the town is a bustling bedroom community for Columbus commuters.

Just the week before, celebrating my brother’s birthday at a seafood restaurant, he and his wife told me and mom all about their trip to Loudonville for its annual free street fair (ongoing since 1876) and a high-school reunion by my brother's Class of 1979. My sister-in-law wanted to know when I ever planned to go back to Loudonville. The last time I was there was when my dad died in October, 2001 and I was charged with helping clean out our family home.

To be continued tomorrow. I am finding it hard to get back into writing about myself since I’ve pretty much let the “muscles” atrophy but, trust me, this is all leading somewhere . . .

*****

For years I’ve either read about or come across people who tell you, in one way or another, that because of hurt/abuse in their childhood and feelings of being unloved and/or rejected, they learned early on to “numb out” so they couldn’t feel anymore. This became the root of their unbelief.

A colleague of mine in New York City who I repeatedly gave the gospel to once told me that sometime in his mid-to-late teens he “learned to be indifferent” to dissolve heartbroken feelings he suffered throughout his youth as his military father regularly moved the family around the country, thereby causing dropped friendships and loneliness in trying to cope with constantly having to try and make new friends in foreign towns.

This co-worker told me this as his explanation for why, even though his mother was a true Believer who wanted the same for him, he never came to want the relationship God offers through Jesus Christ.

I realized from my talks with him about the Bible that he didn’t have a real feel for God’s Word and that it held no real emotional sway even though he was raised in it. He wasn’t opposed to what it said necessarily; it just didn’t grip him to any place of conviction.

*****

Scientific research says the brain of a young child is like a sponge and whatever the parent says or does has a lasting impression.

In a magazine article I have on this subject, it explains the newborn child’s brain contains about 1,000 trillion synapses, or points in which important connections between neurons are made.

The number is twice as high as that for an adult brain and by age three the child’s brain is operating at peak levels for learning—at least twice as fast as an adult brain. By adolescence the number of synapses drops in half to 500 trillion.

This, according to the article, means any concept, event or experience that is reinforced with a child results in a signal sent to a corresponding synapse. If the signal continues to be sent, the concept or experience eventually becomes a permanent part of a child’s memory.

******

An article in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, written by Liesl Schillinger, explains that while the brain's neocortex is responsible for writing, speaking and hatching schemes, it's the brain's limbic brain that makes up our "repository of emotions, instincts and implicit memories of nurturance, grievance and deep preference."

It is the limbic brain, common among all mammals, that "allows mammals to form attachment bonds with one another," the article says. "Love is definitely limbic."

As an illustration of how the limbic brain works in conjunction with the neocortex, the article gave the sentence: "THE cht MEOWED AND PURRED."

"If you read the sentence," the article explained, "your mind will correct 'cht,' both because the brain knows 'cht' is anomalous and because it remembers that it has seen the word 'cat' near the words 'meow' and 'purr' thousands of times. The implicit limbic memory of stroking a cat or having it twine between your ankles is awakened every time you read the word.

"By the same token," the article continued, "a woman (call her Lady X) who habitually indulges the memory of a certain dark and brooding man (call him Man X, whose glance was, to her, electric, who had crooked teeth, liked a certain kind of food and listened to Josh White) burns thousands of links to him into her brain.

"Long after he's gone, the neurons in her neocortex will forge a new connection every time she sees crooked teeth, hears 'Careless Love' or smells Indian food—and these neocortical facts will rain down on her limbic system, irrigating the trench of memory where Man X resides. Anyone she meets who resonates with Man X registers as warmly and familiarly as 'cat.' Anyone else is 'cht,' anomalous, a mistake—depending on his context."

*****

The data indicating the vast majority of Christians trust in Jesus Christ as Savior from the ages of 4-14 is so overwhelming that is now commonly referred to as the “4-14 Window.” Conversely, the Barna Research Group says teens aged 14 to 18 have only a 4% probability of accepting Christ.

The most significant outcome of the Barna survey, in the eyes of the research group’s founder, California-based author George Barna, “is the prevalence of decisions made during childhood.”

Barna reasons, “Families, churches and parachurch ministries must recognize that primary window of opportunity for effectively reaching people with the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is during the pre-teen years. It is during those years that people develop their frames of reference for the remainder of their life – especially theologically and morally. Consistently explaining and modeling truth principles for young people is the most critical factor in their spiritual development.”

*****

“The term 'adolescence' is psycho-babble for a teenager because modern psychology has never been able to figure out what life is when a person goes through puberty and becomes a teenager,” explains Richard Jordan in a study.

“Until they grow those 5, 6, 7, 8 years into maturity . . . Mark Twain said when kids turn 13 you put them into a barrel, seal the lid and feed them through a knothole because that’s the only safe way to handle one. Then when they get to be 16 you plug up the knot hole because here’s someone growing into adulthood.

“Modern psycho-babble says 'adolescence' is where you don’t have good self-worth and self-esteem and you feel rejected. All that’s just selfishness. You know who the Bible says is worthy? The Lamb. Why? Because He was slain. The verse says ‘worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.’

“You want to have some worth, you’re going to find it in Him. You’re a sinner. The Book says all of your good works are as ‘filthy rags.’ That don’t sound too worthy, does it?

"You see, the problem is when people, instead of taking the truth of God’s Word and believing what it says--and taking the solution God’s Word gives you--they want to do it themselves and it don’t work.

“All this self-esteem stuff, and how you have to have this good self-image and that stuff, implodes on itself. It sounds good: ‘I am somebody!’ It sounds great but it can’t hold up under the weight of reality, because who we really are are sinners who come short of a holy God’s righteousness and it takes God Himself in the person of Jesus Christ to provide us the life we so desperately need in the place of our death.”

*****

Over the years, I've had quite a few people tell me they were in their mid-teens when they abandoned belief in the Bible and the Christian faith they were raised in.

I've never forgotten the time a 40-something male colleague of mine once succinctly summed it up for me: "By the time I hit 14, it was '(D) None of the Above.' " He had been raised in church by two Bible-believing parents and participated in evangelistic-type youth group activities through his early teens.

In his autobiographical book, "Surprised by Joy; The Shape of My Early Life," author C.S. Lewis—born in 1898, Belfast, Ireland—reveals he was 13 when he "ceased to be a Christian."

He partially attributed this "disaster," as he labels it, to the influence of a school matron, Miss C., who, at the time, was exploring Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism and Anglo-American Occultism.

"Nothing was further from her intention than to destroy my faith; she could not tell that the room into which she brought this candle was full of gunpowder," writes Lewis. "I had never heard of such things before; never, except in a nightmare or a fairy tale, conceived of spirits other than God and men."

Lewis says he immediately found a passion for the Occult--a "spiritual lust" which, "like the lust of the body, it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. . .

"It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians. But the result of Miss C.'s conversation did not stop there. Little by little, unconsciously, unintentionally, she loosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges, of my belief. The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultism began to spread—yes, and to spread deliciously—to the stern truths of the creed.

"The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) altering 'I believe' to 'one does feel.' And oh, the relief of it! Those moonlit nights in the dormitory at Belsen faded far away. From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting.

"I do not mean that Miss C. did this; better say that the Enemy did this in me, taking occasion from things she innocently said.

“ . . . And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief. . .

"Dear Miss C. had been the occasion of much good to me as well as of evil. For one thing, by awakening my affections, she had done something to defeat that anti-sentimental inhibition which my early experience had bred in me. Nor would I deny that in all her 'Higher Thought,' disastrous though its main effect on me was, there were real and disinterested spirituality by which I benefited. Unfortunately, once her presence was withdrawn, the good effects withered and the bad ones remained."

*****

By the time he turned 18, Lewis, in what he admits had become a "ravenous, quasi-prurient desire for the Occult, the Preternatural as such," had fully immersed himself in pagan writings—everything from Greek, Norse and Celtic mythology to Lucretius' Tantum religio and William Yeats' poetry.

In general, Lewis recalled experiencing in this "enlightenment" period, "a kind of gravitation in the mind whereby good rushes to good and evil to evil. This mingled repulsion and desire drew toward them everything else in me that was bad.

"The idea that if there were Occult knowledge it was known to very few and scorned by the many became an added attraction: 'we few,' you will remember, was an evocative expression for me. That the means should be Magic—the most exquisitely unorthodox thing in the world, unorthodox by Christian and by Rationalist standards—of course appealed to the rebel in me.

" . . . If there had been in the neighborhood some elder person who dabbled in dirt of the Magical kind (such have a good nose for potential disciples) I might now be a Satanist or a maniac."

Lewis reasoned, "Whether Magic were possible or not, I at any rate had no teacher to start me on the path."