🙌It's the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

In 1951, researcher Nikolaas Tinbergen wanted to know if exaggerating a specific stimulus could impact behavior. He created cardboard replicas of butterflies that are attracted to their mates through color and movement. Tinbergen's cardboard butterflies were much brighter and designed to move more regularly than the actual butterflies they replicated. He found that male butterflies preferred the more stimulating cardboard butterflies than the living, breathing females next to them. Tinbergen called the cardboard butterflies"supernormal", or an exaggerated ("super") version, of a "normal" thing.

Neuroscience has determined our amazing brains respond like the butterflies'. If we are exposed to "supernormal" stimuli (or have repeated overwhelming experiences), our brains change themselves to expect "supernormal" to be normal.

Old action films might seem boring compared to modern ones. Little girls develop unhealthy expectations of their bodies after playing with dolls whose proportions would require them to walk on all fours if they were real. Even the "old, normal stimulus" of two people falling in love and getting married is falling off neural pathways in the presence of repeated exposure to pornography.

But whatever the enemy uses to harm us, God can use for good.

What would happen if our "supernormal" stimulus were activated by our kindness, generosity, and radical obedience? What if we lit up our neurons through serving one another? Research says we would be changed from the inside out. Like ultra bright cardboard butterflies, people would be drawn to us. We are not victims to this world or anything in it. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, wired for worship, and embodied to change the world by the choices we make.

Let's start now!

Listen to Passion Music's "More to Come"