A future without fear begins today

Robin Hoagland | from the Christian Science Sentinel

Knowing God is with us replaces fear with confidence.

Charles Dickens certainly captured the mood of tough times. One of his most famous characters stands in a gloomy, dark churchyard, holding a tense, one-sided conversation with the Future—a faceless, hooded, cloaked figure who remains eerily silent.

Ebenezer Scrooge’s uneasy questioning is something most all of us can relate to. And while our own fears might not be penned by a great novelist, they are no less poignant: When will I hear from my daughter serving in Afghanistan? Is there any place to live that is safe from devastating storms or rising sea levels? Or random crimes and terror plots? And what about my health? How will I pay off my college debts? What are my career prospects in a “jobless recovery”? How do I manage my retirement without the finances I counted on?

Too often, there’s a tendency in human reasoning to fill in what we don’t know with worry, anxiety, worst-case scenarios, and plain old fear. It casts long shadows over hope and confidence, shrouds tomorrow in doubt, and leaves us feeling so very vulnerable to anything and everything that could go wrong.

We may think we’re the only ones who’ve ever stood, knees knocking, and peered into a dark and foreboding future. But in fact it’s a pretty common place for people to find themselves in, news cycle by news cycle, generation after generation.

Go back a couple thousand years, and it’s just where the biblical patriarch Jacob found himself one night in the wilderness. He’d left home in a hurry with his own brother vowing to kill him for deception and dishonor. So, following his mother’s counsel, he was setting out for an uncle he’d never met in a country he’d never seen. The sum total of his comfort was a few stones he’d gathered together to rest his head against.

How alone he must have felt as the darkness descended. Perhaps he was regretting those actions that had separated him from his family. Or worried about predators skulking in the shadows. Or thieves who might come upon him. How long his supplies might last. Whether he’d ever find refuge again. Eventually, his eyes closed, and he drifted off.

Something in Jacob was attuned to a spiritual message.

Even in that physical and mental darkness, something in Jacob was attuned to a spiritual message. It was his spiritual sense—a capacity for hope and inspiration that’s innate to all of us. It keeps us connected to God even when we feel most disconnected by our circumstances or situation. For Jacob, it gave him a dream of a ladder from heaven that reached right down to where he was, with angels coming and going on it. And he heard God’s reassuring message, “Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go” (Gen. 28:15, English Standard Version).

What a bold and beautiful vision! With awe, Jacob awoke and exclaimed, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it” (Gen. 28:16, ESV). In the very place he felt so alone, God was right there with him, and would continue to be with him. His future was assured because the great I AM—as God has since been called—is always with us, even when the human picture seems at its darkest and most uncertain.

Jacob hadn’t done anything special to earn that angelic message of comfort. It was simply the impartial nature of Love to continue loving, nourishing, nurturing, and protecting him in his journey from a limited sense of his life and resources to a spiritual sense of God’s bounty and goodness that includes everyone—no one deceived, displaced, or dispossessed. It was a journey that took him many years and brought many lessons, but God was with him day after day after day.

“Surely the Lord is in this place.” The demand is to recognize God is with us right now. Our reasoning goes off track when we start with the limited point of view of life, with only what we see and hear of our circumstances. Human eyes and ears fail to take in the spiritual dimension of life, and so the all-too-common assumption is that God isn’t present. In fact, all of human suffering might be summed up by a false conclusion of God’s absence. With sorrow, we believe God wasn’t there. With pain, we think God isn’t here. And with fear, we worry God won’t be there.

God is right here and always has been.

Like Jacob, we need to utilize our spiritual sense to recognize what’s really been going on all along. God is right here and always has been. That inspired vision broadened Jacob’s view of his situation, and he began to look at things differently. The stones that had been such a hard, unyielding place to rest his head against were what he used to make a strong, enduring altar for God. Same stones, different emphasis. Instead of putting his problems first, he put God first. And that changed how he viewed his future—from fear to confidence, and apprehension to expectation.

“I am with you. Now and always.” Those same angels speak to us too, in every circumstance.

With a lingering knee injury, I lumbered my way up a favorite trail I liked to hike, wondering whether I would ever move freely again. A gentle inspiration reminded me to expect full healing. The lingering doubts vanished on the way back down the trail, as I had a new sense that God had not left me to walk alone on this journey of healing: “I am with you. I AM.” And a few days later, I climbed the same trail with an easy, normal gait—the restoration complete.

When “What if?” starts to reel us in—stop.

The temptation is always to let our thoughts wander toward the unknown ahead of us and get fixated on what might be. When “What if?” starts to reel us in—stop. Replace the “What if” with “What is.” Use that spiritual sense—that humble receptivity and inspired reasoning we’re all capable of—to acknowledge what is. What is present? God, the great I AM. What is going on? Infinite good. What is my situation? I’m under the wing of the Almighty. Disciplined, consecrated prayer of this nature lets us feel within our own hearts that uninterrupted message that God is with us, and that we are safe right now.

It’s a demanding lesson, no question. How vividly I recall a time when my husband was making a career change and sorting through some job opportunities, none of which were solidly in place. If it had been just the two of us, we could have landed anywhere, but we had two young kids and a cat. And our family finances had been stretched thin by a downturn in the economy.

The moving company I had called asked a perfectly reasonable question: Just where should they be sending our stuff? But I didn’t know. Not the city. Not the state. I just knew we had renters moving into our house at the end of the month, and we had to be out. Beyond that, nothing was certain.

It wasn’t the first time the scheduling agent and I had had this conversation about our destination. She needed to be able to fit our lot in with another load going in the same direction. There was a truck to fill, a team schedule, and the right driver to contact for their business to move forward. The uncertainty of our future plans impacted theirs. And she was quick to point out the many potential problems we were both facing without concrete answers.

The spiritual demand is for us to start with what’s going on today.

Many may think it’s nice to hope for a good outcome, but rather naive, because the particular situation—whatever it is—is just too impossible. Well, that’s the realm where prayer opens up potential we couldn’t imagine: “With God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27). But the spiritual demand is for us to start with what’s going on today.

Over the years, I’ve found it liberating, actually, to let go of both past and future and to consider only the present moment. One version of the Sermon on the Mount has Jesus counsel his followers: “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes” (Matt. 6:34, The Message). Whatever actions we’ve taken, decisions we’ve made, or events that have transpired, God’s grace still embraces us, crowning us with “lovingkindness and tender mercies” (Ps. 103:4). And we can lean on that grace.

That’s what I had to do in those weeks and days before our move to a yet unknown destination. I’d been deepening my understanding of the Lord’s Prayer through a study of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. What really struck me was how the familiar petition “Give us this day our daily bread” is expanded spiritually on page 17 as “Give us grace for to-day; ….” Daily grace. That became my constant theme. I wasn’t going to ask God about tomorrow, about what job my husband would have (or not have), about what schools our children would be attending, about what address I would have our bills forwarded to. It was an ongoing discipline to focus just on today. But I tried to look for the grace in that day, to acknowledge all the evidence of God’s unbounded love for each of us.

I just asked for grace for that day alone.

Whenever friends and family—and especially the moving company—would ask if we knew what our plans were yet, I would silently pray for more grace. The answer “We’re still not sure” never felt apologetic or doubtful, but thoughtful and calm. I was careful not to speculate or even say aloud that I wished for one particular outcome or another. I just asked for grace for that day alone.

With only a week before we had to leave our house, my husband got an unexpected offer to work in a city we hadn’t even looked at. It offered many advantages over anything else we’d been considering. Within two days, he’d accepted the job and found an ideal home for us (with an unexpected accommodation for our cat). And I was finally able to let the moving company know where we were heading. The destination happened to fall in easily with another shipment and a driver already scheduled. By the following week, we were unpacked and the children already settled in new schools. A whole new adventure was opening up for us. Everyone involved was amazed that the myriad details could come together so quickly.

No, it wasn’t as if every last worry was resolved in that one move. In fact, while my husband received a nice raise in salary, the increased cost of living in this new city more than completely consumed it. We still needed to pray daily for grace. We still needed to keep our focus solely on what was happening at that moment. But nothing essential was ever lacking. And unexpected provisions and opportunities arrived just when we most needed them. We lived constantly and consistently with the first line of Science and Health: “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings” (Science and Health, p. vii). Tomorrow, when it came, was just another today—and just as blessed with grace.

After 23 years of marriage and seven major moves together (and some minor ones in between), we still pray for that divine grace each day. It’s become the most expansive prayer we know. It addresses every concern and takes us into the very heart of infinite Love, revealing the limitless resources of spiritual good always available.

Nothing, explained the Apostle Paul, can separate us from the love of God. Not adversity, deprivation, nor things beyond our control—not “things present, nor things to come” (see Rom. 8:35–39). When we recognize we are forever inseparable from infinite, omnipotent, divine Love, we realize we are safe today—and every today. With that, we’ve edited Dickens’s forbidding sense of the future out of our own life stories.

Robin Hoagland is a Christian Science practitioner and teacher in Hyannis, Massachusetts.