The Bible promises a lot about divine blessing—that it forgives all sins, heals all diseases, provides for all needs, and delivers from death—not just in a future world but in this one. There’s much more to these promises than calling on a superpower in heaven to perform miracles on earth. There are health-giving laws to live by.]]> Margaret Rogers | from the Christian Science Sentinel

With the understanding that God gives life, all things are possible, even healing.

Because the search for solutions to AIDS has been a long one, the staggering size and severity of the crisis tend to disappear from world headlines. It’s harder to lose sight of it in South Africa, where I visited last year and met people who are directly affected by it every day.

One young mother told me that funerals consume all weekends in her township. Since families are expected to provide food for guests at these events, they’re a financial as well as an emotional drain. Infidelity in marriage is so common that it’s largely unquestioned. Husbands away from home for long periods because of work outside the townships often have multiple partners. Wives know the risk, but feel they can’t refuse sex with their husbands. Many women are also drawn into becoming mistresses because of financial need.

There are bright spots. This young woman broke the norm by working hard in school and finding a good job. She’s convinced anyone can do the same, and she now helps other women stand up for their worth and improve their lives. Many people reach out selflessly, and across racial and ethnic lines, to help AIDS victims and their families.

Each of us can help release the trap of despair.

The inspiration I took away from these examples was that each of us can help release the trap of despair anywhere by proving in our own lives the unlimited possibilities of human beings to change for the good. My faith tells me that physical and moral health is normal and God-sustained. And I’m convinced humanity will break free from the ignorance that produces disease and destructive behavior, because the power that makes minds and bodies whole isn’t human but divine.

“With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26). Christ Jesus said this when he was talking about how hard it is for those with riches to enter the kingdom of heaven. He clearly had more than material possessions in mind. There are costly beliefs and attitudes that rob people of the natural right of health and freedom. Chief among them is the belief that disease is a purely physical process that can’t be affected by thought or prayer, or that it’s a punishment from God. But when we humbly pray to understand what God truly is, intuitions break through that bring hope. The truth is that God is the all-encompassing Life that sustains each of our lives, the infinite goodness that loves us totally. This truth brings us into the kingdom of heaven—which isn’t a place to go after death but an awareness of Life’s blessings now and here.

The Bible promises a lot about divine blessing—that it forgives all sins, heals all diseases, provides for all needs, and delivers from death—not just in a future world but in this one. And a deep reading of the Bible reveals there’s much more to these promises than calling on a superpower in heaven to perform miracles on earth. When read with spiritual insight, the Bible reveals health-giving laws to live by—laws that Jesus understood and applied to heal all kinds of disease. One of these laws is this: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63, New King James Version).

Matter, or ‘flesh,’ doesn’t control life, but is subject to thought.

In the 19th century, a woman of humble background named Mary Baker Eddy discovered in Jesus’ teaching the basic truth that underlies divine healing—that Spirit originates life and is in fact the only substance. Matter, or “flesh,” doesn’t control life, but is subject to thought. Jesus proved that matter’s conditions of sin, sickness, and death have no purpose in the life God gives, and that they can be overcome by spiritual understanding.

Mrs. Eddy wasn’t a starry-eyed idealist. She experienced poor health, poverty, infidelity, and low self-worth. Her heart would have gone right out to parents with AIDS because she was forced to give up her child when she was too ill to care for him. Years later when she had an immediate healing of severe injuries through a realization that Life is Spirit, she knew this was the understanding by which Jesus healed. The infinite possibilities it opened motivated her to practice and teach this method of Christ-healing. One instruction from her textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, says, “Christian scientific practice begins with Christ’s keynote of harmony, ‘Be not afraid!’” (Science and Health, p. 410).

By teaching the true nature of God, the book shows how to stop being afraid of disease. While this continues to be a work in progress, some points I’ve found particularly helpful are first, that God is almighty Truth and Love. Truth and Love heal the body by changing limited, fearful thoughts to more spiritual ones of trust in God and good. Another fear-stopper is that disease isn’t what it says it is. It looks and feels like a physical condition with a cause, a name, and a history, but it can’t be because Spirit creates only spiritual and good things. It takes willingness to open up to a deeper spiritual sense to accept this, because the physical senses can see only a material universe. But we can trust and claim what makes sense to the heart—that God doesn’t curse us with disease but loves and cares for us as our eternal Father and Mother.

We find health in being God’s likeness.

In addition to removing fear, a Christian scientific treatment for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome would correct the thought of deficiency, which means lacking something necessary for completeness. Healing prayer rests on the truth that God’s spiritual creation doesn’t lack anything. Christian Science supports Jesus’ divine logic that a good tree produces good fruit. Perfect God produces perfect creation. The children of God don’t need to get security, worth, or health. In fact “with men”—a mortal sense of ourselves—this is impossible. We find completeness in knowing we come from infinite Perfection. We find health in being God’s likeness, in being loving and morally pure.

Yes, it’s hard to believe we’re spiritual and complete when we feel so material and needy, and that’s why it helps to remember that disease isn’t what it appears to be. Jesus saw spiritually. He healed people of apparently physical conditions such as blindness, deafness, and paralysis because he knew their sufficiency as children of Spirit. He demanded that this true health and perfection appear. It’s useful to think about demands he made on the people he healed and the truths behind them that apply to all of us:

• Receive your sight. Spirit gives you the ability to see yourself as the blessed image of God.
• Be opened. You can hear and accept your God-given worth and perfection.
• Rise and walk. You are free and strong to rise above fear and to move forward in spiritual living.
• Be whole of your plague. You are whole and well, and no evil can invade the life Spirit gives you.

Can we all receive our health as Jesus commanded these people to do? With will-power, blind faith, or positive thinking, it’s impossible. But with the understanding that Spirit gives Life, all things are possible.

God is Love only and does not punish us but saves us from sin.

Christian Science treatment also goes deeper than the physical definition of virus to address the broader meaning of a corrupting quality; something that poisons the mind or soul. We might well consider how wrong beliefs about God and creation have corrupted theology and poisoned the mind of humanity. For example, a merely literal reading of the Bible could give the impression that God creates us susceptible to sin and then punishes us for it. This mistake has caused untold suffering. It makes people feel they’re hopelessly bad and unworthy of God’s blessing. So many who begin to study Christian Science say its most wonderful revelation is that God is Love only and does not punish us but saves us from sin.

Jesus came to manifest God’s love to us. Consider some of the truths behind his commands to those he healed of sin, fear, and despair.

• Sin no more. God enforces your goodness, and you have authority to stop doing whatever isn’t good.
• Love one another. There is no anger, hate, or domination in God’s creation, only love.
• Peace, be still. You are peaceful and secure under God’s control.
• Be of good cheer. You’re made for joy, not sorrow. Life is deathless, spiritual.

As wonderful as these truths are, it takes spiritual toughness to admit them in the face of evil that feels immovable. And we have that strength through God’s love for us and our love for God. Standing up for our spiritual goodness will help everyone out of the trap of immorality or disease. These conditions aren’t imposed by nature but by the lie that says there’s no perfect Creator, no good God. Once we know they’re lies, we can resist them and claim our innocence and God’s allness.

Can the prayer of spiritual understanding, practiced in our daily lives, end the AIDS pandemic? That remains to be proved. Certainly the effort to live more spiritually would have to be at least as great as the human effort to solve it by material means. The size of a problem shouldn’t make us hold back, though. I was inspired recently by a news story about a sailor rescued at sea. His boat sank in a storm and he found himself tossing in 20-foot waves, far from land. It was night, it was snowing, and he couldn’t see anything. His situation appeared hopeless, but he told God he believed in Him. It came to him to start swimming, though he had no sense of direction. After a while he bumped into a life raft! A rescue team had received his distress signal and dropped a raft in the area. Then, despite high seas and almost no visibility, they found him by a signal from his pocket-sized, non-waterproof flashlight. In what looked like impossible conditions, neither he nor his rescuers gave up, and he was saved.

To me that willingness to believe in God is the most important thing we all have to give the world. With even a little spiritual understanding, each of us can be a beacon light to others lost in storms of fear and helplessness, and by shining it be rescued ourselves. The first page in Science and Health describes the way: “The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love” (Science and Health, p. 1).

Margaret Rogers practices and teaches Christian Science healing, and lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She is also a member of the Christian Science Board of Directors.

A new mother learns that she doesn’t have to rely on her own resources to properly care for her children. Instead of figuring out her own parenting strategies, she could turn to God to direct, outline, and show her and her children how to proceed.]]> Lois Marquardt | from the Christian Science Sentinel

Parents can turn to God for guidance in raising children.

Whether it’s swimming, skiing, tubing, boating, if it has to do with water, our family is all over it!

We first discovered this affinity the day after our twin daughters, whom we adopted from Russia when they were six, came home to the United States. It was July, and we couldn’t wait to introduce them to the water playground at a local public pool. The day was warm and sunny, so we spent hours splashing and wading in the cool, refreshing water. Almost every day the first few weeks home, we had an invitation from friends to swim somewhere different. I mentioned this as a point of gratitude and delight to the Christian Science practitioner we’d been praying with in support of the adoption process. She wasn’t at all surprised by this abundance of generosity, and she immediately remarked that our family had been given all the essentials and more—even of playtime in the water. As the Bible says, the “seed is in itself”—God’s expression is all-inclusive, and so our daughters “came with their own” supply of goodness, purity, and even friendship (see Gen. 1:11).

I was so glad to hear that! These were my first few weeks as a parent, and I was beginning to wonder how I could sufficiently provide for all the needs and demands of our children. Right there before me was the joyous evidence of how God provides for each of us, always, perfectly.

The common view is that parenting means taking on a role of making things happen.

It is easy to get into a parenting/provider mode of thinking we need to “make things happen.” I’d seen lots of examples of great parenting in my neighbors and friends, and my own parents. And it seemed to me as if they were all working on a lifelong building project. Whether it has to do with education, supply, behavior, friendship, or activity, the common view is that parenting means taking on a role of making things happen.

But this view, based on a standpoint of incompleteness, isn’t exactly the view of God’s creation described in a verse in Ecclesiastes: “I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it” (3:14). We are God’s doing. As an individual spiritual idea of God, every child is the intended result of His multiplying goodness, intelligence, joy, health, and harmony.

As I prayed with this concept, I knew right then that I had to drop an incorrect—and pretty disheartening—perspective on parenting. That is, instead of trying to take charge of my daughters’ education and behavior, I first must embrace, with my own childlike expectancy, the fact that our divine Parent enriches our individuality with indelible good and guides us in all our endeavors. What could be added to what God has created? It was my privilege to bear witness to the immeasurable excellence of Love’s work. With this different perspective I found my thought more still and peaceful. The process of figuring out my parenting strategies was replaced by listening, turning to God to direct, outline, and show me more of His glory.

Nothing could take away my daughter’s happiness and joy.

Fast forward a few years. One time one of our daughters was new to a classroom of students who had been together for a few years. She soon realized that they all had established friendships and work groups that didn’t include her. I visited the classroom one day and saw her sitting, working by herself, while all the other children were laughing and working together in groups. My heart sank, and I was so sad that she was left out. But immediately I acknowledged that she was spiritually complete and that because of this, it naturally followed that she could not lack friendship. She was embraced in God’s love and joy right where she was. Every child in that room was surrounded by and included in the presence of Love. Nothing could take away my daughter’s happiness and joy, because they are part of her spiritual individuality.

My worry and frustration instantly disappeared. There was only one way I could understand what was going on with my daughter, and that was to see her as complete in God’s uninterruptable doing. For the next several weeks, every time I thought of her at school, I reaffirmed her joyous inclusion. And I saw this joyful attitude reflected in my daughter; she was content and at peace. Soon she was being invited by others to participate in work groups and in playtime, inside and outside of school. My lesson of loving and trusting the completeness of God’s doing was expanding all the time.

A passage in Science and Health explains what I was learning: “… the ideas of God in universal being are complete and forever expressed, for Science reveals infinity and the fatherhood and motherhood of Love” (Science and Health, p. 519). There are no plateaus or lulls in the forever-active power of our Father-Mother God’s causing us to be. Each of us, as a parent, a child, a grandparent, comes fully equipped, prepared, and forever complete. We’re God’s perfect work.

Lois Marquardt is a practitioner and teacher of Christian Science. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Healing in Christian Science is not the result of prayer through faith alone. It’s systematic, reproducible, and scientific because it’s built on spiritual understanding that comes from following Christ Jesus’ teachings and example.]]> Sherry Darling | from the Christian Science Sentinel

Christian Science healing is systematic and reproducible, not an application of personal faith.

When Mary Baker Eddy experienced spiritual healing after a severe fall in February 1866, her life could have turned out very differently from what it did.

That healing could have simply confirmed her religious faith. She had always had a deep regard for the Bible and the power of prayer, and she could have taken the healing, which recovered her from injuries that were considered life-threatening, as proof of the efficacy of turning to the Bible and God. That would have been remarkable on its own. Even if Mrs. Eddy had just expressed her heartfelt gratitude for her healing and then went back to her normal life, it still would have been significant.

But Mary Baker Eddy sensed something more behind her healing; she wanted to find out what had healed her. So she spent the next three years of her life studying the Bible and recording what was revealed to her about the book of Genesis. And as she learned, she began to apply her findings by healing people in her community through prayer. What Mrs. Eddy ultimately discovered during this time of prayer and study, and through her initial healing work, was that there was a system behind spiritual healing.

At that point, Mrs. Eddy could have lived her life solely as a successful healer. She could have improved and saved the lives of numerous people. Her healing work would have lasted as long as her life, and this would have been a considerable contribution to society.

After she figured out that her healing was based on divine laws, she didn’t keep it to herself.

But, again, she pursued a different path. After she figured out that her healing was based on divine laws, a way of understanding God and her relationship to Him, she didn’t keep it to herself, and she didn’t share it in a way that made the healing work dependent on her as an individual. Instead, she chose to teach her system of healing to others and to record it in a textbook so that anyone could learn how to practice Christian Science, to heal themselves and others. She taught her first student in early 1867 and published the first edition of Science and Health in 1875. She founded her Church, then called “Church of Christ (Scientist),” in 1879, to provide the literal and figurative structure for her discovery. She chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881. Although Mrs. Eddy dissolved the college in 1889 to devote her time to a major revision of Science and Health, she reopened it in 1898 under the auspices of her Church’s Board of Education. Today the Board of Education continues to prepare those who will teach classes on Christian Science healing.

But what made her discovery teachable? What made a textbook the right form to share her discovery? Why did she refer to spiritual healing as a Science? In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, Mrs. Eddy explained her experience in that initial period of search and study:

“The Bible was my textbook. It answered my questions as to how I was healed; but the Scriptures had to me a new meaning, a new tongue. Their spiritual signification appeared; and I apprehended for the first time, in their spiritual meaning, Jesus’ teaching and demonstration, and the Principle and rule of spiritual Science and metaphysical healing,—in a word, Christian Science” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 25).

She continued, “The miracles recorded in the Bible, which had before seemed to me supernatural, grew divinely natural and apprehensible; though uninspired interpreters ignorantly pronounce Christ’s healing miraculous, instead of seeing therein the operation of the divine law.” The next paragraph adds, “Jesus of Nazareth was a natural and divine Scientist” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 26).

What Jesus did was scientific.

She concluded that if the healings weren’t miraculous, then they were repeatable and available to all. What Jesus did was scientific, and Mary Baker Eddy felt that as the discoverer of these truths about his healing work, she had a duty to share them with the world.

Her discovery of the Science of the Christ also included an understanding of scientific prayer. She made it clear that prayer in Christian Science does not include petitioning God to take away sickness and it does not involve formulas. Mrs. Eddy discussed prayer throughout her published writings, as well as in her letters and manuscripts, and she even devoted a specific chapter to the subject in Science and Health. Looking back years later on her experience in 1866, she wrote, “My experience of the effects of faith was no miracle and nothing impossible to all who have that faith which is followed by spiritual understanding and is equal to avail itself of Christ’s promise, not to a select number, but to all who exercise it” (A10234B, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).

Here Mrs. Eddy made an important distinction: Healing in Christian Science is not the result of prayer through faith alone. This point is key to understanding the importance of her choice to write a textbook and teach Christian Science to others: She saw that spiritual healing was systematic and reproducible. Later in Retrospection and Introspection, she made plain the difference between faith-cures and healing in Christian Science:

“It is often asked, Why are faith-cures sometimes more speedy than some of the cures wrought through Christian Scientists? Because faith is belief, and not understanding; and it is easier to believe, than to understand spiritual Truth. It demands less cross-bearing, self-renunciation, and divine Science to admit the claims of the corporeal senses and appeal to God for relief through a humanized conception of His power, than to deny these claims and learn the divine way,—drinking Jesus’ cup, being baptized with his baptism, gaining the end through persecution and purity” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 54).

True healing comes from living according to the teachings of Jesus and following his example.

Mrs. Eddy made it clear that true healing—which not only restores the body but also brings greater understanding of God—comes from living according to the teachings of Jesus and following his example. She returned to the message of the Christ and the importance of spiritual understanding in a piece she dictated to Calvin Frye in October 1901. Here she very specifically pointed to the kind of scientific prayer that heals in Christian Science:

“Christ Jesus said, ‘Ask and ye shall receive, seek & ye shall find’ and ‘When ye stand praying, believe that ye have the things ye ask for & ye have them.’ The apostle James writes, ‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.’ What authority have we superior to the aforesaid on prayer healing the sick? We have none and the only possible failure to demonstrate the rule of healing according to the Master’s words and those of the Apostle must proceed from praying amiss. The Master made perfect faith or faith founded on spiritual understanding the condition for the prayer that heals the sick and added the full realization ‘It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.’ That Spirit is all and the flesh profiteth [nothing],—even that matter is not to be taken into account pro or con on the subject of Christ’s prayer that heals the sick.

“This conclusion is corroborated by the scriptural demand ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Likewise, the Apostle made the condition of the mind of him who prays, that is, the righteous man or the good man, to be he who heals by prayer and none other can, for the prayer of the unrighteous availeth not ….

“On this rock of Christ’s prayer Christian Science plants its standard of healing in contradistinction to all other form of mortal mind cure, faith cure or any other mental or material process of healing the sick” (A10312, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).

Righteousness and spiritual understanding are the keys to reliable healing. Mary Baker Eddy proved the effectiveness of Christian Science by demonstration, by Christly living. She saw that what had healed her was a repeatable, provable Science that all could employ, rather than an anomalous application of personal faith. She healed via this system and taught others to do the same. And because she shared her discovery with the world, Christian Science is available to all for all time.

Sherry Darling is a researcher and special projects manager at The Mary Baker Eddy Library.

When “What if?” starts to reel us in, we can stop. We can use spiritual sense—that humble receptivity and inspired reasoning we’re all capable of—to acknowledge what really 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. This defuses fear.]]> 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.

Can cancer be healed through spiritual means? Yes. As Christian Science practitioner and teacher Michelle Nanouche explains, no disease is stronger than God’s love, which wipes out fear and actually governs everything.]]> Michelle Nanouche | from the Christian Science Sentinel

Cancer doesn’t have more power than God’s love for His creation.

Is there any difference between the answers you give for healing cancer, and the answers I need for healing another disease? These two diseases, when in advanced stages, seem incurable. What can I do to be healed?

You’ll find that behind most conditions there’s an underlying similarity, in that we’re dealing with the idea that either we have a built-in flaw or vulnerability, by nature of believing that we are material instead of spiritual—or that we’re some kind of Spirit-matter mix as God’s creation. So I would have to say, no. When we’re talking about healing in Christian Science, what we’re really talking about are the laws of God that are in operation, keeping us safe. It’s not about figuring out how to unwind the particular snarls or beliefs or fears of a particular aspect of mortality, naming itself one disease or another.

My daughter-in-law seems to be vulnerable to the belief of heredity and the inevitable appearance of cancer. How can I best pray to support her spiritual identity and that of my grandchildren?

I’ve had to deal with a lump in my breast. My mother lost a breast to breast cancer; my aunt lost a breast and then her life to breast cancer. So heredity was definitely a fear that was weighing heavily in my thought. It’s actually saying that we’re not so much related to those we love, but to the diseases of those we love. That was a subject that, for me, required some really deep thinking about who I truly believe I am. My prayer and study involved understanding my spiritual link as not coming through anyone or anything, not seeing myself as on a mortal timeline with a beginning and an ending.

Spiritual understanding can take anyone off the mortal timeline.

In praying on that subject, you may want to give some thought to immortality, to what it means to be immortal—what eternity and eternal being really mean. I found in my own experience that a better understanding of my own immortality as a spiritual reflection of divine Life, God, ultimately erased my sense of vulnerability or a dangerous connection to my family through material molecules, through DNA, and through diagnoses. And this spiritual understanding can take anyone off the mortal timeline—the sense of eternity meaning time without end—and makes eternity more a depth of experience, instead of a lateral line from one end of being to another end of being.

We’re all always living right now, at one with all of God’s creation, and that spirituality allows us to find our roots, which take us to the eternal depths of who we really are, and at the same time allows the inspiration of this moment to free us to be ourselves. And that’s what immortality is. Immortality isn’t a future thing that’s coming, or an extension of now; it’s a deeper sense of now that includes complete freedom.

If the case concerns a person who has had cancer before, and there is a return of cancer, what then?

I think what we’re talking about in that instance is a weak spot, a sense or belief of vulnerability. There’s a passage in Science and Health that immediately comes to thought: “The divine Science of man is woven into one web of consistency without seam or rent” (Science and Health, p. 242).

The reason I love that particular passage is that it refers to “consistency” or the condition of being completely held together and retaining our perfect form, but without a weak spot. If you think about it, in a pair of pants, a seam is like a built-in weak spot. And a rent is the idea of a weak spot or a vulnerability that’s the result of some past shock, or some past event.

There’s no moment when our spiritual being can give out.

So what healing really consists of is getting back to the understanding that there is no moment when we’ve ever had a weak spot. There’s no moment when our spiritual being can give out, can wear out, have a wound under threat of being opened again.

The whole idea of DNA, of being preprogrammed to have a dangerous condition, and the idea that a predestined problem is waiting latent in the background, can be immediately replaced with the fact that we are preprogrammed, and it’s what God says and knows about His creation right now that governs us. And it’s not old news, not something that was known a long time ago, but what is being known about each one of us right now. Our divine nature keeps us completely safe. We’re programmed to be whole and healthy.

Conventional wisdom usually says that the best way to prevent or survive cancer is by early detection. How does Christian Science address this thought?

When I think of early detection, I think of what it means to be a spiritual detective. Preventative care, from any angle, involves knowing what you’re looking at and what you’re looking for.

In the Bible we read about God naming us and knowing our name (see Isa. 40:26). And when I think of early detection, it really does help to know what is spiritually true about God’s creation. It’s like, how do you recognize the child who comes to your door on Halloween, even though he may be in costume? You know him because you know him as he really is. And so, even when there’s some kind of a horror mask being presented to you, there’s an ability to recognize who that child really is. When I think of detection, I think of understanding our spiritual identity.

There seems to be a big media blitz on the subject now. Wouldn’t a quick prayer to protect us and our loved ones on the spot—whether it’s TV, media, or even when we are shopping—be in order?

I think you’re right. The selflessness of that kind of prayer is very powerful, because it’s not just about asking, “What do I need to know to keep me and mine safe?” It’s the opportunity to let your heart be open to embrace and lift up everyone in society who may be dealing with these images and the fears that are coming before them through the media.

How do you handle the fear of cancer?

I think the best way for me to answer this question is from experience: How have I handled the fear of cancer?

The more afraid I was, the more pain I was in.

Early on when I was dealing with the lump in my breast and a great deal of pain, I found that the pain seemed proportional to the fear—the more afraid I was, the more pain I was in. I called a Christian Science practitioner, asking her to pray with me and for me, and free me from this fear. She commented that if you were having a dream that you were being chased by a bear, your issue wouldn’t be to deal with the bear; your issue would be to wake up. And she was encouraging me, rather than fighting my way through the problem in order to handle the fear, to wake up from this belief that the most powerful fact of that moment was disease, and to understand that actually the most powerful thing at that moment was that God loved me.

What she could never have known was that I’d had recurring dreams some months before, about a bear chasing me. And in each of these dreams the bear would almost catch me before I would wake up in a cold sweat. Then one night I again had this bear dream, except that I outsmarted the bear. I managed to get myself across a river and was really making tracks to get away from the bear. I was winning, and then I wakened, and I was so mad, because I thought, “I’m beating the bear and I don’t even get to know how the story ended?” And so I lay there trying to force myself to go back to sleep so that I could get back into the dream, so that I could celebrate how smart I was because I’d defeated this bear. And after about five minutes of trying to get myself to sleep, I suddenly thought, “What are you doing? It was a dream! There was no bear!”

It was one of those amazing moments of realizing that even the desire to know how the story was going to end is all part of the same package deal. The entire thing is an illusion. That was a huge step forward for me, realizing that fear was being fed by the illusion. Once I entered my protest against this belief as a reality I needed to contend with, the fear lost its grip on me. I still had symptoms and I still had issues and things I needed and wanted to understand spiritually, but that was a huge step forward in letting go of the fear. I was mastering an illusion, not battling a disease. I was awakening to my health. I wasn’t struggling to work through a problem, after which I could let go of the fear. The fear was the first thing to go.

Let me add just one more thing on that. There’s a fabulous quote in Psalms that has just become a rock for me. It says, “There were they in great fear, where no fear was” (Ps. 53:5). I love that. To me, that speaks to “bear dreams.”

If someone has seemed to identify himself with a so-called incurable disease, how does he separate himself from the belief, break the mesmerism, and accept God’s love which heals?

What pops out to me in that question is the idea of fatalism—the idea that disease is inevitable, that everyone must die of something. And I believe that our starting point is actually to understand eternity—and what a tremendous gift of God’s love eternity is. This idea that disease is inevitable stems from the belief that we’re on a mortal timeline, a “birth and then do the best we can until we die” kind of timeline, after which, when we’ve become spiritual beings, we may live forever.

We’re all learning how to accept the love that God has for us.

Actually, we always have existed, always will exist. That is what we’re all learning to give more and more consent to in our lives. Divine Love is what we’re all learning to yield to. We’re all learning how to accept the love that God has for us, how to accept what eternal being means. But we’re not struggling each day in order to make Love love us, or to make ourselves be lovable, or to create in ourselves the capacity to become immortal or to express eternity. That’s never been a burden placed on any of us. As God’s children, we simply reflect Him.

I have supported myself through two cancers now by using Science and Health, but I have been unable to manifest total healing both times. What am I doing wrong?

Wherever that spiritual journey takes you, I’m grateful to hear that you’re hanging in there, and you’re working this out with your Father-Mother God. One thing that may be helpful to consider in taking your next step is a wonderful definition of health in Mary Baker Eddy’s Rudimental Divine Science. She wrote, “Health is the consciousness of the unreality of pain and disease; or, rather, the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else” (Rudimental Divine Science, p. 11).

I’ve realized that it’s easy to define health as what it’s like when you’re absolutely conscious that everything is great. You’re feeling good, everything’s looking good, it’s easy to claim that as a healthy state where harmony and nothing else is going on. But we can also claim health when we’re conscious that pain and disease—even if they seem to be apparent—are not our real condition as God’s creation. That it’s like that dream state of being chased by a bear. Even at the moment that it seems the most real, it’s still an illusion about who we are and what’s really going on in our being.

Can you offer some experiences of sharing the healing truths of Christian Science with people who are under conventional medical treatment for cancer?

I’ve had friends that I’ve talked to who’ve had little or no contact with the healing power of Christian Science and in some instances would consider themselves atheists, and yet the vocabulary of Love always breaks through. I find it’s less the words and more the love that’s behind those words that enables the communication to be something that’s powerful.

God’s love is able to break through and be felt.

As far as words go, I’m not really recalling any specific conversations, but I can say just as a general rule, in communicating with people who are struggling with a problem, understand that the primary things you’re dealing with are likely to be fear and regret. In responding to that, it’s just that gentleness of thought, that power of knowing that God’s love is able to break through and be felt. There really is no place or condition we can find ourselves in where that light of Love cannot be felt. And to be willing to be there and be a witness for that allows gentle words, and sometimes strong and clear and direct words, to be made apparent in the appropriate way at the appropriate time.

Does prayer to heal cancer need to address a specific type of cancer, like breast cancer versus leukemia, etc.?

Mary Baker Eddy, in talking about praying for others, indicated that it’s important to address the fears of the patient. So there’s no generic treatment for breast cancer, skin cancer, or different types of a disease. What we’re addressing in prayer is thought, eliminating the specific fear that is attacking an individual patient. So there is no formula for treating breast cancer. Our prayer is simply to understand that there is nothing bigger, nothing with more influence or power, than God’s love for His creation.

When healing is slow and nothing seems to help, what do we do?

Pray. You know, prayer is a conversation. If you’re having a conversation with your best friend and you just don’t seem to be getting anywhere, that’s not the time to stop. It may be the time to examine whether we’re doing more talking than listening, or how to approach the conversation, but it’s not a moment to say, “OK, we’re just not going to be friends anymore.” I think a lot of times—at least in my own experience, when I’m not getting somewhere—it’s the result of my doing way more talking than listening in my conversation with God.

One thing that I’ve found helpful in getting back on track is to simply take out a fresh copy of Science and Health and go right back to the preface, which lays down the underlying theme for all of the rest of the chapters. Start right at the beginning, and read it with a sense of “What do you have to tell me today?”

Sometimes with the things that are the most familiar, that we’ve read over and over and over a zillion times, we may be tempted to simply check them off our list, thinking, “Oh yeah, I know what that means. Yeah, I’ve read that before. Oh, I’ve understood that or I had an experience 20 years ago where I knew what that meant,” and we just kind of skip on. We may not feel that sense of momentum or of what we’re reading being fresh, but there’s absolutely no statement in Science and Health that isn’t completely capable of healing any condition at any time. We’re not looking for the magic statement, but are listening for what God is saying to us, how that Truth is communicating to our hearts today and what it means at this moment.

How do you pray about a family member who is suffering with a condition believed to be incurable when everyone else is dwelling on the idea of impending death?

When we’re talking about a family member, that tends to drum up a sense of vulnerability, because we love them and know them and we’re feeling particularly compassionate. But whether you’re dealing with a family member or have just read about someone in the newspaper, any time you’re confronted with this belief that there’s some law that mandates suffering, and there’s nothing to do about it, I think we want to stand up mentally, prayerfully—stand up against that just as strongly as we would take a stand for a family member who’s being abused or someone we’ve read about in the newspaper who’s being abused.

It’s more than just righteous indignation. It’s prayer that springs out of a just a recognition that groundless abuse—and that’s what a diagnosis of something as being incurable is—can get nowhere with a spiritual idea. No matter how many other voices may be speaking in a room, within the sanctuary of your own consciousness, your voice can be heard. Your prayer can be felt.

A dog is severely injured, and a veterinarian offers no hope. But a family keeps praying, and in just a few days their pet is running and leaping again.]]> Ann Brown | from the Christian Science Sentinel

An injured dog’s recovery shows that nothing can override God’s Word.

Some dogs live just to run and leap. That was our Einstein. He even loved playing soccer with Travis, our young son.

One Friday evening we let Einstein out for his run in the woods near our home. He’d usually return within an hour, but that time he didn’t. Concerned, Travis and I drove around trying to find him. At the same time, we prayed with this psalm: “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore” (Ps. 121:8).

Prayer in Christian Science was always our first choice for help and healing, since it was so effective. As a matter of fact, over the years the entire family had experienced many healings of childhood diseases, sprained ankles, broken bones. So praying that night for Einstein felt very natural. We trusted that the joy and intelligence that had led him outside would guide him safely home; that God would truly preserve his going out and coming in.

But we didn’t find Einstein that night. Then early the next morning we heard a low painful whine. Calling and searching, we found him lying in a pile of leaves not far from the house—he couldn’t lift himself or move his back legs. Our hearts went out to him, and we cradled him in our arms. I remember being filled with gratitude and love for God that Einstein had been led that close to home. Then we gently placed him on a blanket and carefully pulled him into the house. We kept praying, expecting him to respond to the power of prayer as he had so often before.

In a day or so it became evident that we needed help caring for Einstein. Although he was still unable to move his back legs or stand up, his desire to be with us was so great he’d drag himself to be wherever we were. There was no evidence of his being in pain, only of his love for us. We decided to take him to a veterinarian; we planned to continue our prayers but felt he needed to be confined in a quiet place, kept clean and cared for. We hoped that he could be where he could see and hear people and be talked to. We’d adopted him from the animal shelter and didn’t want him to feel deserted again.

We were told the injuries were severe.

The vet asked to examine him thoroughly, and we agreed and left Einstein with him. We received a call the next day and were told the injuries were severe, and that Einstein would never walk again. The vet had three suggestions: He could perform an operation, though he held out no hope for its success; we could have a cart made to help Einstein get himself around; or we could have him put to sleep.

But we knew we had another option, which we were already using: the power of prayer as we’d been taught in Christian Science. The basis of our continued prayer for this precious and loved dog came from the spiritual account of creation found in Genesis: “God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good” (Gen. 1:25). To me this is the Word of God referred to in John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God …. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1, 3).

I prayed throughout the night and found great courage and comfort from the fact that as Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “God is the Life, or intelligence, which forms and preserves the individuality and identity of animals as well as of men” (Science and Health, p. 550).

Einstein’s steps were also ‘ordered by the Lord.’

Then it came to me to paraphrase a favorite psalm that promises “the steps of good man are ordered by the Lord” (Ps. 37:23). After all, in their fullest sense these words include all creation, and I prayed with conviction that Einstein’s steps were also “ordered by the Lord.” And as part of God’s creation, Einstein could respond to the command of God and step free of this verdict of limitation and helplessness. We could also respond to God’s command and see him express the indestructible qualities of joy, strength, freedom, and health. After all, as Science and Health states, “All of God’s creatures, moving in the harmony of Science, are harmless, useful, indestructible” (Science and Health, p. 514). As I prayed, I reasoned that since strength and joy are spiritual qualities, they could never be taken away; God steadfastly and constantly provides these gifts to His entire creation.

I felt so inspired. But then it came to me that these were just words. I felt shaken and taken over by a dark and heavy feeling—what good were words in the face of this awful diagnosis?

No word, diagnosis, dark foreboding thought, or evidence could overturn God’s Word.

Yet right then came the strong conviction that no word, diagnosis, dark foreboding thought, or evidence could overturn God’s Word—His promise that all He made was good and ordered by Him. I thought of this from Science and Health: “Divine Science, the Word of God, saith to the darkness upon the face of error, ‘God is All-in-all,’ and the light of ever-present Love illumines the universe. Hence the eternal wonder,—that infinite space is peopled with God’s ideas, reflecting Him in countless spiritual forms” (Science and Health, p. 503).

Suddenly I felt as I had never felt before, that Christian Science really is the Word of God, a truly divine Science that heals every fear and pain and ill. A deep calm and joy took over as I continued to drink in the inspiration I had received from the Scriptures and Science and Health. I was convinced that everything was OK with Einstein.

The vet called in the morning to say there had been marked improvement—Einstein was wagging his tail! The third day we were told to come get him, but were cautioned to be very careful and to lift Einstein into the car. However, he had other ideas. After we’d left the vet’s office, he bounded and leaped into the car by himself, not unlike the man whom Peter and John healed at the temple gate, who went away “walking, and leaping, and praising God” (Acts 3:8). What a happy dog! He was indeed walking and leaping. And did so for many more years.

I was—and still am—praising God.

Ann Brown is a Christian Science practitioner. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Burnout, stress, gossip, low morale—all these characterized the office where this woman worked. Looking for solutions, she heard a mental voice asking, “What would you do if Jesus walked into your office?” That changed everything.]]> Diane Sheth | from the Christian Science Sentinel

Even if we feel we’re burned out, God isn’t and can rejuvenate us and our situation.

There is a way out of “burnout,” stress on the job, and stress in our lives. And the way is through turning to God and discovering how much God loves each one of us, supports us in our journey, and helps us overcome challenges, whatever they may be.

Some time ago, while I was a single mother, I worked as a purchasing agent for a manufacturing company. With the demands of my job—I received upward of 50 phone calls per day—I really felt stressed and burned out every day. My routine included driving during rush hour, picking up my child from a baby sitter, feeling anxiety about my job, and hoping that I could be the best, most loving and patient mom while sticking to a tight schedule. I wondered when I’d be able to catch up and have what I considered a normal life. In addition, I began to develop stomach pains and had to deal with fears about this physical ailment.

I had to look to God to find my solution.

When one is immersed in challenging situations like this, it’s tempting to see oneself as bogged down in a human dilemma, with a yearning to escape from it, or at least improve upon it. But as a student of Christian Science, I understood that I had to look higher than the human sense of things; I had to look to God, to spiritual reality—the way God sees things—to find my solution. The Psalmist said, “From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Ps. 61:2). I understood that with God there was no fear or anxiety, no lack of balance. Instead, God was my source of love, strength, and daily renewal. And I strove to understand more of this divine balance and sustaining power.

Every morning before leaving for work, I made a special effort to spend some time studying the weekly Christian Science Bible Lesson, to find strength for the day and lift my thoughts to this higher viewpoint, where I knew healing would occur.

One of the Bible verses I loved was “In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion” (Ps. 71:1). When I prayed with this verse, I was asking God to help me out of the confusing and stressful conditions occasioned at the office.

God, who is the divine Mind, knew peace, harmony, stability, strength—the very things I needed. And because God is also Love, I could trust that His plan for me and all His children included the good that seemed to be eluding me. More and more, I became convinced that I was not alone, no matter how things seemed to be. I did have God. And then, a wonderful healing occurred in my life.

I came home one evening very exasperated from another difficult day, and felt pained in my stomach area. When I felt that way, it would occur to me that perhaps I had an ulcer. I longed to feel the healing power of God’s truth, which is described in this statement from Science and Health: “Because Truth is omnipotent in goodness, error, Truth’s opposite, has no might” (Science and Health, p. 367). That evening I went to bed but could not sleep. Worries about my job and my physical condition kept me awake. I tossed and turned and asked myself, “How can I take another day of this?” Resigning my employment was not an option.

In a moment of desperation, I began to have a mental talk with God. Christian Science has taught me that in addition to Mind and Love, God is divine Principle, upholding a universal, benevolent law that is always operating and available to help us. And I was deeply convinced that I could rely on this divine law. But at this point, I began to talk to God as if He was my best Friend and a divine Parent. I asked, “Father, what am I going to do?”

‘What would you do if Jesus walked into your office?’

And God’s answer came to me in the form of a couple of questions. I was quite surprised by this. The first question that came was, “What would you do if Jesus walked into your office?” I couldn’t have thought that up in a million years! The follow-up question was, “How would you perform your job then?”

Well, those questions truly awakened me out of what felt like a hypnotic stupor, a mental haziness. You see, the office I worked in at that time was rife with gossip, low morale, strong opinions, complaints, and lots of employee turnover, which fueled an uneasy atmosphere and added to the stress I felt. So when God spoke to me in those questions, I thought if Jesus Christ walked into my office and sat down, I would be so in awe, so respectful, so reverent of this master Christian that I would be willing to do whatever he asked me to do. Then I considered the second question. And I knew from the bottom of my heart that I would perform my duties in the best possible, most perfect way I could, and that I’d do this for the glory of God. After all, wasn’t this what Jesus had done?

I remembered Jesus’ words: “Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works’ sake” (John 14:10, 11). I had a responsible position, and companies were vying for the business I could place with them. But I realized I was not in this position to glorify Diane or exercise false ego, or for any prideful reason. I was there to glorify God.

This realization gave me a deep sense of peace and joy. My whole outlook changed. I went to sleep with a happy anticipation of good and a conviction that God had answered me. He had delivered me from all my fears. At the same time, all the physical discomfort I was feeling completely faded away. I never experienced it again. I was healed.

I went to my office with an entirely new attitude.

The next day I went to my office with an entirely new attitude. While I was driving to work I declared, “I work for God, and Jesus Christ is my manager.” And I meant it. I knew that as long as I performed my work to the standards of Jesus Christ, letting it glorify God, everyone around me would be satisfied with my performance and it couldn’t be stressful. I couldn’t lose.

I returned to the very same position I’d held for years, but I went with new purpose and the enlightened understanding I’d gained. When my manager made a request of me, I was more than happy to accommodate. I felt hassle-free and unruffled throughout the day. Although the request was coming through the manager, I was working for the glory of God and measuring my performance by the standards of the Christ.

Others began to take notice.

My mental and spiritual reformation brought a new sense of humility and love to the department, and others began to take notice. They too began to act differently. The demanding pace didn’t change, but the static in the office was defused. People were calmer, there was a softening of character, and greater respect for each other was very apparent. A cleansing was taking place.

Mary Baker Eddy once quoted Wendell Phillips as saying, “One with God is a majority” (see Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 245). When the healing light of the Christ, which Jesus embodied, is in our hearts, and we bring that light to any situation, those around us see it and benefit from it.

There was a happy follow-up to this healing, which was quite remarkable to me. The feelings of being burned out were gone. In fact, I really enjoyed going to work every day and reveled in the job. Instead of buying into negativity, to what may be described as outside business calamities, I began to see these instances as opportunities to turn immediately and confidently to divine Mind for intelligent answers. All this had far-reaching results. A changed emphasis, improved work quality, harmonized relationships, more intelligent decision making, and clearer spiritual discernment resulted in a promotion within a few months, which I gratefully accepted.

When we feel that we are at the end of our rope, completely burned out and deeply challenged—whether as a homemaker, a parent, an employee, or even as someone looking for employment—we can hold on to God, hold on to everything we understand about Him as our best Friend, our divine Parent. The One who loves us stands beside us, and always will. Each of us can feel His support and see proof of the Almighty’s ability to deliver and heal. His help is available to all—today.

Diane Sheth is now a Christian Science practitioner in Charlotteville, Virginia.

This article was adapted from an interview on Sentinel Radio.

Thousands of soldiers are deployed in war zones, but that doesn’t mean they have to be in danger zones, as this family found out when one of its members was in Afghanistan.]]> Julie Ward | from the Christian Science Sentinel

We can experience God’s protection anywhere, even in war zones.

When it come to God’s protection for each of us, I’ve felt great prayerful conviction. But this was put to the test two years ago, when our son announced to the family that he’d volunteered for a tour of duty in Afghanistan with the United States Army. This came as a surprise.

Although we supported his decision, and even though I was praying all “the right words” before his deployment, I’d sometimes awake in the night gripped with fear for his safety. I couldn’t bear to watch news reports about soldiers in the Middle East, and sometimes, alone in the house or the car, I would find myself sobbing uncontrollably.

When our son was a baby, I always held him and sang hymns to him at night. As I felt him slipping into sleep, I would whisper a sentence from Science and Health: “God is everywhere, and nothing apart from Him is present or has power” (Science and Health, p. 473). I felt that if he knew the truth of this one simple fact, he could learn to reason out from it to the full revelation of Christian Science. It was something that would always be with him.

Danger is actually unknown to God.

This had been a great help to me as our son grew up (and in this new experience as well). As he played football in high school, bought his first motorcycle, and even attended bull-riding school during a college spring break, I learned again and again that there were no danger zones where God was missing, no dangerous activities outside of God’s control, and nothing dangerous in God’s creation (people or animals!). Danger is actually unknown to God, because there is no randomness in the omnipresence of divine Principle. We are His reflection, His ideas, and because of this we are never in jeopardy. Because God is infinite Life, there is no “Life-threatening” situation. Instead, Life is irresistible, impregnable, invulnerable. It’s utterly stable.

And so during the time before my son left for Afghanistan, I also remembered a sentence from Mary Baker Eddy’s Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896: “Space is no separator of hearts” (p. 150). I began to realize that our closeness had never been a matter of physical proximity. We’d found it in the ever-presence of God, of divine Love, which was never touched by time or space. We’d already proved this when our son was just a baby. We’d adopted him from Korea when he was ten months old. At one point, just before everything was finalized, it looked as if the adoption was in jeopardy. The Christian Science practitioner who’d been praying with my husband and me every step of the way said to us, “This child is your child of promise, and God’s promises are kept.” She assured us that our son had a specific spiritual mission that could not be threatened. I knew that was an eternal fact—just as true the day he would leave for Afghanistan as it had been when he was a baby.

Our son’s life-prospects were not defined by time or place.

And so as our family prepared for our son’s deployment, I asked myself, “Is God afraid for him?” That would be incomprehensible. God knew that my son’s life was immortal. In other words, as God’s idea, made in His own image and likeness, my son’s identity was spiritual and existed forever. It had no beginning or end. God knew that no harm could come to him, because he could never leave God’s kingdom—“the reign of harmony in divine Science; the realm of unerring, eternal, and omnipotent Mind; the atmosphere of Spirit, where Soul is supreme” (Science and Health, p. 590). Our son’s life-prospects were not defined by time or place. He was, as Psalm 91 says, “under the shadow of the Almighty” (Ps. 91:1).

Before our son left, my husband made an inspired suggestion. It was this: Whenever anyone in the family was feeling frightened or lonely, we would “meet” in the 91st Psalm. We would spend the year learning the real meaning of the promises from God that it contains, and as we grew spiritually, we would grow closer. The first few verses set the scene for its powerful message: “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; my God; in him will I trust” (verses 1, 2). I loved the idea that our son had an ever-present refuge and fortress, and I loved the idea of a “secret place,” where human opinion, human sympathy, or even human hatred could not find him.

According to the Bible, Jesus must have known that “secret place.” At one point, he had been preaching in the synagogue in his own hometown, Nazareth. His challenge to the local complacency stirred up an angry mob, and they brought him to a hillside on the edge of the city with the intent of throwing him over. But the Bible says that “he passing through the midst of them went his way” (see Luke 4:16–30). Inspired by this, I saw that any soldier could pass right through the midst of fear, doubt, hatred, deceit, violence, without harm. One comforting hymn in the Christian Science Hymnal (No. 9) reads,

He knows the angels that you need,
And sends them to your side,
To comfort, guard and guide.

I had an experience that proved this to me, on the very day we took our dear son to the airport to fly to his base and on to Afghanistan. As we watched him disappear in a huge security line, the tears began to flow. By the time we reached the parking lot, my eyes and nose were red from crying. When the cashier at the remote payment center asked if I had allergies, my husband told her why I’d been crying. Without a moment’s hesitation, she threw her arms around me and began to pray out loud for our son. She exclaimed that God would go before him to protect him and that God would bless him in all that he did. When she finished, another cashier hugged me as if I were a long-lost sister and also offered her prayer. Both women asked for his name so that they could continue to pray for him.

That spontaneous expression of love was only the beginning of a multitude of angels, or “heavenly hosts,” that followed, day by day, during the year that our son was gone. There were still moments of fear and doubt, but most of all there were Love’s tender lessons for all.

At one point during our son’s service, I saw on an early-morning news-crawl that a suicide bomber had killed many people in the village where our son was stationed. Although I never saw another mention of this incident in the newspaper or on TV, it alerted me to go online and find a report, where I learned that the bomb had, indeed, been detonated in a barracks where our son spent many hours each day mentoring Afghan policemen.

My husband and I turned immediately to the 91st Psalm and began to pray. Among the powerful verses, these leaped out: “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust; his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday” (Ps. 91:4–6).

There was only one way to turn—to God.

We dialed our son’s cell phone and—for the first time in many months—got right through to him. He was on the scene, but safe, and we later received a moving account, written by another soldier, of the calmness and leadership he’d expressed that day. Our son later told us that his first job was to secure the area, and he did that. But he said he realized the most important task was to comfort his men, who were overcome with shock and grief. To do this, he had to first quiet his own emotions. In the days that followed, he realized that there was an overwhelming temptation to fear the very people he had trusted. There was only one way to turn—to God. He had to feel a brotherly love for the Afghans more than ever before.

In the aftermath of this incident, it was important to me to know that death was not a reality that our son had somehow dodged with either luck or skill, but that death is always illusory, never marking an end for anyone, at any time. As the Bible explains, death has no power and is not inevitable. Death is merely the false concept that God, Life itself, can be absent. As we see the omnipresence of Life, we can say with St. Paul, “Death is swallowed up in victory” (I Cor. 15:54).

Our son is home now. We are grateful each day, but we haven’t stopped praying. And we won’t stop until every soldier comes home. This is not an unrealistic dream. It is the fulfillment of this command and promise from Science and Health: “It should be thoroughly understood that all men have one Mind, one God and Father, one Life, Truth, and Love. Mankind will become perfect in proportion as this fact becomes apparent, war will cease and the true brotherhood of man will be established” (Science and Health, p. 467). Our job is also to seek this understanding and demonstrate this truth, day by day, in even the smallest details of our lives.

War will cease, inevitably replaced by peace—because peace is an eternal fact of Life. This is God’s promise to all who are praying for a loved one in a war zone.

Julie Ward is a Christian Science practitioner and teacher. She lives in Alpharetta, Georgia.

At the heart of the deadlock in the Middle East is the conviction that the struggle is about land, material history, rivalries, and generations of slights, distrust, and human will. It’s this material view that needs to cede to a spiritual one so genuine progress can take place.]]> from the Christian Science Sentinel

Breaking the deadlock in the Middle East requires a spiritual rather than a material viewpoint.

Toward the end of November 2009, some hope began to grow in the Middle East via news reports of a prisoner swap in which Israel would release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli sergeant the Islamist group Hamas has held since June 2006. But since then, the Israeli government has put a damper on the discussions. At this point, there appears to be little evidence of real change in the situation.

A news analysis in The New York Times made the point that both sides have found “a dark truth” that “force has produced clearer results in this dispute than talk” (“Painful Middle East Truth: Force Trumps Diplomacy,” October 20, 2009). It’s true that both sides have engaged in military actions, commando raids, and the like. But reliance on force alone is unlikely to lead to long-term solutions, because it can’t really bring about permanent healing. Too often, force only buys time until the enemy recovers.

To break this self-fulfilling cycle requires something more powerful than tanks and rockets. It demands the kind of spirituality described in this passage from the sixth-century (BC) prophet Zechariah: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts” (Zech. 4:6).

The spirit of negotiations must change, and prayer can help bring about this adjustment.

This is the spirit Abraham exhibited when he and his nephew Lot had to deal with conflict in that same region long ago. He said, “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren” (Gen. 13:8). Brotherhood of this kind may seem alien to those who have been locking horns in the Middle East for decades, but the spirit of negotiations must change, and prayer can help bring about this adjustment.

At the heart of the deadlock is the conviction that the struggle is about land, material history, rivalries, and generations of slights, distrust, and human will. It’s this material view that needs to cede, so genuine progress can take place.

Mary Baker Eddy provided wonderful insight, pointing to prayer that will help everyone shed this burden. In one of her Bible Lessons she wrote, “Self-renunciation of all that constitutes a so-called material man, and the acknowledgment and achievement of his spiritual identity as the child of God, is Science that opens the very flood-gates of heaven; whence good flows into every avenue of being, cleansing mortals of all uncleanness, destroying all suffering, and demonstrating the true image and likeness” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 185). This applies not only to individual human progress, but also the collective change that comes about when people actually put into practice this spiritual truth can totally transform the mental environment and lead to new views of old hatreds—views that are willing to give up the past for everyone’s better future.

Those of us outside the Middle East can contribute by surrendering our own mental images of Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinians.

Even those of us who live outside the Middle East can contribute by surrendering our own mental images of Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinians as antagonistic material players on a material stage. Instead of accepting the cycle of violence and uneasy peace as inevitable, prayer can demand permanent change under God’s law, to the end that all will have the right to exist and also have the useful elements of life—water, food, space, and, most important, love.

Love for God and for one’s fellow beings is the key that opens the door to peace. This may seem like a hopeless ideal in a mental environment where people feel victimized or where a history of hatred seems impossible to lift. Yet it becomes feasible when one recognizes the true history of the man and woman God created (see Gen., chap. 1). In that history, only good and perfection have been possible because God is Spirit, and each one of us is God’s perfect likeness. Within that spiritual context, one can gain strength to confront humanity’s challenges, to claim the power of God to set all people free from the past and ready them to accept a better present.

Our unity with God makes unity among humankind possible.

Wisdom and integrity are both necessary ingredients for lasting change. Wisdom can open the way to a recognition that the faith traditions of the Middle East spring from, and are united by, one supreme God who governs all. Our unity with God makes unity among humankind possible. Each individual is the spiritual idea of the one Mind. Unity with one’s divine source is reflected in the unity of nations under Love’s benevolent and intelligent government.

When people give up, even to a degree, the mental images of nations as material entities locked into a material history of antagonism and rivalry, those “flood-gates of heaven” begin to open. Instead of matter, with its inherent limitations, Spirit comes into clearer focus, with all its light and promise. Progressive or even sudden change for the better becomes possible. The recent celebration of the Berlin Wall’s fall in 1989—without a shot being fired—brought many comments from those who worked and prayed for freedom. Is there any reason why such change cannot come to the Middle East also?

Far from family and friends for Christmas? This woman learned it really doesn’t matter where we find ourselves on a special occasion. Loneliness, worry, cultural isolation—none of these stand a chance when banished through a spiritual understanding of the Christmas message of love.]]> Jennifer Rosebrugh | from the Christian Science Sentinel

We can express God’s love at Christmas even if we’re far from family and friends.

“Newest member of the team? You’ll be staffing the Embassy over Christmas. You can take a holiday next year!”

As a freshly minted foreign service officer on my first overseas posting, I felt my heart sank when my boss said that. Somehow the excitement of the season didn’t seem quite so great when I realized I’d be alone in a foreign country, trying to speak a language I’d yet to master. I hadn’t even had time to make close friends. And while I’d known my commitment to the foreign service would require some sacrifices, this requirement to stay behind wasn’t something I’d really anticipated. What about my small family—how would my parents and brother back in Canada feel when our usually very close foursome was reduced to three at this important time of the year?

I took recourse in the “friends” I did have—my Bible and Science and Health. If solace was to be had, I’d manage to find it through turning to God in prayer, just as I had during every challenge up until then. With concordances, a dictionary, and those two books on hand, I resolved to really make a concerted effort to learn, much more deeply than ever before, what Christmas was truly all about. Somewhere in the corner of my heart, I had a feeling that this spiritual discovery alone would respond to the longing and emptiness I feared would ruin an impending solo Christmas.

I needed to keep my eyes, ears, and heart open for evidence of that good—just as the wise men had, and the shepherds.

As I pondered the Bible accounts of Jesus’ birth, it struck me that in essence the Christmas story was a Love story. God’s love for humanity was manifested in a very tangible way through the gift of the Christ-child. In the original Christmas story, there were no preconditions of geography, tradition, money, or culture in order for that love to be expressed by God. And similarly, there could be no preconditions for it to be felt by me now. I had to be expectant of being led to that “baby,” that idea of Love, by whatever sort of “star” or inspiration I would recognize. I needed to keep my eyes, ears, and heart open for evidence of that good—just as the wise men had, and the shepherds.

A few days before Christmas, I was driving home on a Sunday afternoon. On the sidewalk I spotted a group of street children, reputed for their pickpocketing skills, about to rob several map-reading tourists. Freshly inspired by that morning’s study of the Christian Science Bible Lesson, I mentally shouted out, “No! God’s children are innocent and harmless!” Unable to stop in the traffic, I continued my prayer with determination, insisting on the fact that all of God’s children were rightly parented by God, correctly nourished, deprived of nothing necessary to meet their needs, and certainly without dishonest instincts. From the corner of my eye I was relieved to see that the situation resolved quite naturally.

Five minutes later, I was driving in the outside lane of a bridge, crossing the large river that bisects the city. I watched with bewilderment as a scene unfolded on the sidewalk quite a bit ahead of me—until I realized with horror that a woman had dropped her bag over the bridge’s side and was about to follow it, plunging into the river’s icy depths. Again, I mentally shouted “No!” This time, I was able to slam on the brakes, get out of my car, and race along the bridge’s edge in time to grab the woman’s ankles before she could leap off. Another driver reached us a few seconds later. Though I had little expectation that the distraught woman would understand me because of the language barrier, I firmly and insistently began telling her that she was loved by God, her Creator, that suicide was not necessary, that we cared about her, and that she should come down from the railing. A policewoman appeared moments later from the far side of the bridge, and escorted the woman away.

Later, I returned to my apartment and collapsed in tears. This upsetting event, along with the attempted pickpocketing I’d seen earlier, shook me. Where was the Christmas peace I’d been so earnestly seeking? And why me—why had I been thrown into these dramas? The answer came to me quietly and firmly, and it’s one which I’ve heard since in other tough moments when asking God, “Why me?” It stopped my tears instantly. The gentle divine message was: “Why not you? If not you, then who?”

Christmas was all about God’s gift of love under even the unlikeliest of circumstances.

Very peacefully, I saw that I was beginning to learn an important Christmas lesson: Prepare yourself to be of help, and you will be given the opportunity. Christmas was all about God’s gift of love under even the unlikeliest of circumstances. So how could I be thrown off balance by having the opportunity to put all the spiritual truths I’d been learning into practice?

As it turned out, that Christmas was a landmark for me. Since I was freed from the usual frenzy of shopping, planning, and organizing, I felt surrounded by a profound and so very important sense of the joy-filled spiritual meaning of the season, all too often crowded out in holiday busyness. Unexpected opportunities presented ways for me to partake of an uplifting Christmas Eve musical in a local church, enjoy a Christmas meal with new friends, and learn new customs, new ways of celebrating in this land far from home.

Fast forward a few years. New city, new country that for years had an official state policy of atheism. I was a duty officer again over Christmas, halfway around the world from family. I mailed gifts to Canada in autumn to ensure their arrival, and, inspired by the aforementioned experience of my Noel spent in solitude, again set out to really refresh my appreciation of the season.

Christmas morning I was awakened by a phone call from a colleague, a national of the country, inviting me to go skating in a city park. As I hurried with other pedestrians along the sidewalk, a buoyant feeling of the day’s spiritual significance began to wane when I saw the scene before me. Thinly-clad senior citizens shivered at the bus stop begging for money in the swirling snow. Cars screeched to a stop at the curbside kiosks so their drivers could gulp a shot of alcohol before jumping behind the wheel again and zooming off. Hungry stray dogs approached me for scraps. An unsteady drunken man fell against me in the subway car.

‘Wasn’t the original Christmas just another humble working day?’

At that point I was starting to feel overwhelmed. “Oh dear God,” I groaned, “how can I be joyful in this place? And for all these citizens, December 25 is just another working day.” No sooner had the question formed, than the angel answer came: “Wasn’t the original Christmas ‘just another humble working day’?”

I was in awe at the simplicity of that message. The man beside me in the subway suddenly seemed to straighten up as I mentally appreciated his worth as the child of God. I also thought of an article a friend had written, in which he spoke with persistence of actively loving and blessing all he saw (Pierre Pradervand, “The gentle art of blessing,” Christian Science Sentinel, December 20, 1999). I resolved to do the same.

That Christmas morning, I silently blessed the grandmothers who swept the falling snow from the pathways we skated as we snaked through the park—grateful for their employment instead of bemoaning the need for them to do such work. I prayed for and blessed the people in that country for their persistence and hopefulness, instead of expressing cynicism that things would never change for them. I blessed the stray animals, knowing that each one of them was precious in the Creator’s eyes.

I again experienced a ‘mountaintop Christmas.’

I also blessed the colleague who had proposed this outing in the snow, recognizing that, had I slept in and spent the day in solitude, I might not have been alert to respond with prayer to the very vital needs of the community that crossed my path. And yes, for the second time in my life, far from loved family, friends, and traditions, I again experienced a “mountaintop Christmas” filled with joy and a feeling of closeness to all God’s creation. This is still fresh in my memory, though many miles and months have passed.

As I plan for yet another Christmas this year far away from Canada, my “home and native land,” I can say with confidence that I expect it to be another unforgettable season. I’ve learned it really doesn’t matter where you might find yourself on a special occasion. Each of us is the loved daughter or son of God, divine Love, and we have a right to feel comforted and companioned. Loneliness, worry, or cultural isolation—none of these can stand a chance when banished through a spiritual understanding of the Christmas message of love.

Jennifer Rosebrugh is presently posted in Budapest, where she works helping Canadian companies do business in Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo.