The Gift of Christmas
Being away on holiday at this time of year is fantastic, being home in Joburg while everybody else is on holiday has it’s merits too. The city of gold seems to slow down a fraction, calm a little, the traffic eases up and we all tend to be a little more chilled. Unless of course we’re last-minute Christmas shopping, scrambling to get the lunch ready for the extended family, or rushing around from one function to the next.
We may be occupying our minds with different stuff, but they’re no less busy. In fact, we may even have more to think about than usual because our minds never really take a break. Think about how much information your brain processes every second.
It’s filtering and interpreting what we’re seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, thinking and imagining. It’s maintaining our heart rate and blood pressure and controlling our movements. It’s analysing what someone said to us a few days ago, trying to calculate what might happen next year, choosing Christmas presents, planning holidays, regretting mistakes and celebrating accomplishments. It’s hard to comprehend the power of our mind.
Scientists in Japan thought they would try to simulate our brain’s activities using a very fast computer. I’m not talking about the sort of thing you could buy for Christmas. The experiment called for a supercomputer, roughly equivalent to 250 000 average machines combined. The Fujitsu K Supercomputer has over 700 000 cores and 1.4 Million Gigabytes of RAM, it consumes the same electricity as about 10 000 suburban homes, and was set the task of simulating just 1 second of the activity in just 1% of the human brain.
It took 40 minutes.
Seriously, we power our minds with a few mouthfuls of turkey, ham, roast potatoes and peas, and just 1% of it performs 2400 times faster than a room full of cutting edge Japanese technology!
Here’s something worth occupying our mind. What kind of mind created ours? If that’s got you thinking, why not take it a step further? What if that mind, the One who created us, became one of us?
At Christmas, we celebrate the mind blowing fact that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ, and that He did that out of love for every one of us. He gave us the greatest gift imaginable, Himself.
As you give and receive gifts this Christmas, remember that you are wonderfully designed, created and loved, by a God who knows what it’s like to be human. Don’t let another year go by without making a decision to get to know Him and His plan and purpose for your life. Merry Christmas.
