Brain transplant? Seriously? Well, not quite yet. But a recent story about an amazing development through Johns Hopkins got me thinking about it. 26-year-old, Sgt. Brendan Marrocco, made history by having the first successful double arm transplant in history! Sgt. Marrocco’s arms and legs had been blown off in a roadside bomb in Iraq. Incredibly, he is now making history with real, human arms from an anonymous donor who had offered his body for use upon his death.
Attaching the donor’s arms to a new body was very complicated! The bones were attached, then the muscles, the tendons, the blood vessels, arteries and veins. But that isn’t enough. The body is smart – too smart. It recognizes that those arms don’t belong to it. In order to prevent the body from attacking the new appendages with anti-bodies, they introduced a sneaky solution. They took bone marrow cells from the donor’s spine and injected them into Marrocco, fooling his body into thinking the arms were his!
As difficult as that surgery is, God’s children face far more difficult transplants. First, God promises to give “a new heart and a new spirit” (Ezekiel 36:26). Then comes a real challenge, a transplanted mind! It is for those who turn away from a life dedicated to sin, amputate the old mind, and adopt a new life dedicated to righteousness. Paul writes that “we have the mind of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:16).
Was Paul proposing something like a brain transplant? Is it possible to replace my thoughts with Christ’s so drastically that His mind is in my head? Something along these lines happens when a believer submits in baptism to His death, burial, and resurrection. The problem? From day one, the old, sinful self, starts rejecting the “Christ-mind.” The solution? Inject some of him daily: His words, His life, & His teaching. Grow in such a way that your body thinks His mind is yours. You will be even more thrilled with the result than Marrocco is with his new arms!
