Brainstorming, Take Cover

The human mind is remarkable as God designed.  Lisa and I were discussing the other night about how smells, sights, and sounds trigger a memory, even those long forgotten.  For our minds to store infinite bits of information, we utilize very little that we have access to retrieve. 

We marvel at computers and the seemingly unlimited acquisition of info.  A computer’s capability is based on data programmed into it by those with human minds.  The media bombards us with possibilities and potential of computers giving our minds movies, programming, and stories, and to ponder and have vivid imaginations.

The electronic wizards of computer chips can never replace the human mind.  Mankind is the ultimate creation of God.  This three-pound organ is 75% water with approximately one hundred billion neurons with a storage capacity of one quadrillion (1,000 trillion) connections.  Therefore, when our minds start to wander it has a lot of territory to cover.

As Lisa and I talked, my mind started on a journey.  There is so much stored in my brain and the possibilities of where I’m going are endless.  Lisa comments sometimes, “I would love to see into your brain, but it scares me to think what you are thinking.”  Well, my brain is storming and everything is swirling.

That night something she said something that triggered a memory of an old black man that was our neighbor and friend of my grandpa.  They had known each other for decades.  I thought about the influence he had on the community and on me.

Lawrence Atchison was a very dark man.  His mode of travel was his feet and an occasional traveler that might give him a ride.  When I started driving, I gave him a ride home.  He lived about two miles west of us.

Lawrence was kind, gentle and big and tall.  He would travel to Land Mart which was our local store where there was hoop cheese, tubes of baloney, bread, and the entire essential for living in rural Alabama.  After filling grocery sacks, not the thin and flimsy plastic ones but brown paper sacks.

I remember seeing Lawrence walking home with two sacks under his arms and baloney protruding out the top of the sack.  If grandpa was sitting on the front porch rocking, Lawrence would join him.

Two old friends would reminisce about growing up together and living as sharecroppers.  Now both worn out from the hard labor and rugged lifestyle of trying to eek a living in poverty-stricken Alabama rocked, laughed, and talked.

Lawrence lived on a dirt road and lived in an old shack which was kind of standard for most that lived in our community.  Most of the time, Lawrence traveled at night.  He would visit his relatives that lived east of Land Mart.  He was hard to see at night.  If any dogs barked after sunset, depending on the time of the year, we all knew that it was either Lawrence or the old black panther making their journeys.  The black panther came through migrating in the spring or in the fall.  Dogs would hide when the panther was passing, and they walked with Lawrence when he was passing.

Sometimes on dark nights the dogs would have a soft bark and daddy would say, “Old Lawrence must be headed home.”  If it was someone of something passing, the dogs growled and barked angrily.

Lawrence and grandpa have been dead for more than sixty years.  Most people in our have never heard and know of them.  There is no evidence of Lawrence’s old shack, but Grandpa’s front porch is across the road from our home.  Sitting or swinging on my front deck I can still visualize and almost hear Lawrence and Grandpa enjoying the relationship they had.

They had something that computerized society so critically needs today.  They used their minds to reminisce and had a personal relationship with each other as well as with most in the community.

I thank the Lord for Him allowing Lawrence and me to cross paths in life’s short journey.  I remember walking home from football practice after being dropped off at Land Mart.  The night was so dark that I could not see the road.  I walked with one foot on the pavement and the other on the grass for the quarter mile journey.  I wondered how Lawrence was able to make the trip.

In closing, there used to be a commercial that stated, “A mind is a terrible to waste.”  With all the capability of our brain and all the information available, why waste our brain.  There used to be a song that had the lyrics, “Input, output, what goes in is what comes out.”  That’s our brain.  It processes and stores what we experience.

Thanks, Lawrence, for the influence you had on me.

 

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.  (Romans 12:2 KJV)