The Danger of a Distorted View of Life

By Pastor Claude Thomas
“A Beautiful Mind” is a movie about Nobel Prize winner (1994) John Nash. He is a man who learned to live with a tremendous challenge. He was schizophrenic. So, he created an unreal world in his mind. He created people in his mind. And he saw them in his mind although they weren’t real people. But they were to him. A little girl 10 years old, a college roommate, and a cruel gangster type were always around in his mind. While he eventually did learn to distinguish the real from the perceived, it nearly cost him his family and nearly cost his child his life.
In one vivid scene in the movie, Nash has taken his little boy to bathe him. Nash ran the water and put the little boy in the tub. His wife was outside taking clothes from the clothes line. She was starkly taken to the realization of the extent of her husband’s condition and ran into the house. She asked Nash where the child was. Nash responded by saying a friend was watching the child. Only the friend wasn’t real. The wife ran up stairs and found the little fellow under the water in the tub. She picked him up and saved him from disaster. The near disaster was because Nash didn’t have a true view of life.
How do we get a true view of life? The answer: the Bible. The Bible is absolutely reliable and relevant truth. So, we get a true view of God and a true view of life through the truth of Scriptures. With that settled, we can get on with living!