Human Perception

Last night (at the house meeting) I spoke about the brains capacity to recognise and use patterns to discern the nature of a particular item. For example: If I ate 5 extremely hot chilli’s you would expect my appearance to change: I would go red, I would perspire. Alternatively, if you observed this appearance you would most likely conclude I had either just eaten something quite hot or I had just performed some rigorous exercise. Another example was reading coffee shop menu items from a distance: Prue decided that one item on the list read as “Corn Mornay”. When she put on her glasses it read as “Coffee Takeaway”. Often our pattern recognition can incorrect due to any number of things: eye sight difficulties, context, prejudice, random synapse responses yet to be explained by science, etc…

In Acts 2:12 we read the question: What does this mean? The human mind is always looking to classify, understand, explain, etc… Here on the day of Pentecost there was a phenomena that did not match any known pattern. In this particular case Peter stood up and explained. However, in the 21st century, the general population will observe the lifestyle pattern on a spirit filled Christian and conclude either: a) they are just a nice person; or b) they ascribe to some religious belief.

Occasionally people will ask “what does this mean” (i.e. they will get out their glasses and do something to correct the poor recognition of the pattern). As a general rule, they wont. I left it to the individual to draw a particular point from that. I found it interesting that we had 5 testimonies that all were about putting a foot forward and telling someone of the gospel (Mark 16:15) instead of waiting for a question (1 Peter 3:14-15).