WHEN I WAS A CHILD, no tree was safe from me. I just loved the challenge to climb high. If it was not easy at first, I returned later to try again. I saw any problem with the climb as an interesting challenge—my focus was always on the final accomplishment. The fact that a tree was not yet marked as “mission accomplished” was not at all discouraging, but a future opportunity to be deeply enjoyed.

So it is, I’ve found, with all things that need some time and faithfulness while we grow spiritually in order to solve a problem.

But sometimes the challenges of today do not look like our tree experiences in childhood. Sometimes there are situations that seem so daunting that we might harbor doubts about whether there will be a healing or even a change for the better. We might think that with all the prayer that has gone into finding a solution, all the understanding that has been brought to bear on the situation, the outlook is still uncertain. These, however, are not thoughts coming to us from the divine Mind, but only an attitude of beleaguered mortal mind. Overcoming such fears is only another branch in the climb, and one we’re sure to master and leave behind since “… progress is the law of God, whose law demands of us only what we can certainly fulfill” (Science and Health, pp. 233 ). With continued trust in the spiritual Science of good, we’ll find ourselves in the arms of divine Love, where we’ve been all along, and rediscover our childlikeness and the understanding that we’re eternally safe in His care.

The following verse in the Bible could be said to sum up feelings of hesitation and doubt: “We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble!” (Jer. 8:15). But the Bible wouldn’t be that book of wonders that enables us to navigate our travel in life if it didn’t invite or even force us to look again. It doesn’t belittle the problems we’re facing. It confronts them all. But at the same time, the Bible offers a window through which we can look and see any problem or situation from a different—a spiritual—perspective. To me there is a stunning reply to the above statement to be found in these words: “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else” (Isa. 45:22).

While it’s right and good to look for peace, health, and all good, Christian Science also requires a shift of focus. All that we truly yearn for is the outcome of turning to God! We need to look up, leaving the horizontal attitude of thinking that does not include the divine. Christianly scientific prayer doesn’t start with need or insufficiency. Rather it’s looking out from the pinnacle of perfect Life and perfect Love. A hymn puts it this way: “From glory unto glory, / From strength to strength we go” (Frances R. Havergal, Christian Science Hymnal, No. 65).

Following this line of thought we arrive at different conclusions. It’s like experiencing the view from the top of the tree. We see God and feel more His saving power in our lives, rather than limiting ourselves to the perspective of the need to be saved or freed from something dire. And God is not just asking us not to fear; He also gives the reason for this demand: “Because I am with thee.”

Trying to become better or to be healed without the perspective of God with us includes fear and doubt, because it is limited to a kind of blind faith, without a reason to trust. But looking first to God for all and as All brings the reason for reliance and fearlessness—the actual presence of the Divine. The intention is not to get rid of sickness or to acquire something we think we need, but to get to know God, to get to know Him as Love and Truth. Whatever needs to be accomplished, in reality it’s always all about knowing in our hearts the full Truth. Starting in this way expresses a higher form of selfless reverence for the divine Ego and exclaims, “It’s all between You and me, God!” From there every challenge has a solution.

In this new perspective on the issues we have to deal with an amazing fact becomes apparent: Whatever is unlike God, or Truth, must be a lie about Him and His manifestation, the male and female of God’s making, whom He watches over “as the apple of his eye” (Deut. 32:10). To “look unto me” is therefore an invitation to “unsee” whatever is different from the infinite One. The Bible and its inspired interpreter Mary Baker Eddy turn us to the need to address everything that’s not according to God’s standard of excellence as a lie. What a gift of true Christianity it is to clearly show that we need not fear a lie, because it is only a bogus argument for absence of Truth.

Recently I learned some of these ideas through a healing I experienced. For several months, I had trouble with one of my knees. Occasionally there were very sudden, very strong pains, which several times left me leaning on a wall to steady myself. Also, I feared that every movement would harm my knee even more. One day while I was doing some errands, these pains came up again with such suddenness and force that my movement was impaired drastically. I halted, and fear crept in. It all seemed so totally abnormal. But it was also the very moment that proved to be a turning point. I prayed to see what I needed to know, and the answer was clear: Define it as a lie. Don’t look at this condition in any other way but as a lie. It’s not something that needs repair, to be gotten rid of, to bow before. It’s a lie.

I felt an influx of inspiration through this change of perspective. Negative reasoning turned into pure gratitude for God and for His love for me. The essential truth of my identity was in my innate, irreversible mobility as God’s spiritual creation. As I classified the problem as fraudulent, I could see that a lie always points to the truth because it’s a reversal of truth. In this sense, and if we don’t halt in submission to the deception of the material senses, we can learn that right at the place where pain and discord may have appeared to take hold over us, Truth, Life, and Love are maintaining the spiritual agreement between God and man. Looking unto God, the governor of the spiritual kingdom in which we live, at the same time makes us recognize the error or the lie as nothing! I decided to walk on, in a step-by-step journey, thanking God all the way home. The fear of imminent harm to my knee was of no importance anymore. Within a short time the condition just vanished, permanently.

I understood better how powerful it is to never start with the problem in order to eradicate it, but always with God. Acknowledging Him restored my inspiration, my sense of wholeness and balance. Praising God for all that is true about Him, for the Love that He is, and for the perfection He expresses in us fires our scientific prayers when we are in need of freshness and hope. Joyful gratitude is true spiritual seeing and baptizes us into our divine nature. It verifies our coexistence with Life, and “brings immortality to light” (Science and Health, pp. 336 ). It’s a natural and innate capacity in each of us, and a powerful instrument to dispossess ourselves of the awful belief that we’re both good and evil, both spiritual and material.

In battling the belief that we are disconnected from God-endowed inspiration, we can begin to explore more deeply the “maximum of good … the infinite God and His idea …” (Science and Health, pp. 103 ). We naturally start to refute the sense that we are sinners or victims, and embrace our status as the blessed offspring of God.

Deciding to live and think on the side of Truth and its manifestation in daily life is also deciding to see that limitation is a lie, and giving up all that’s linked to that false concept. It’s about living in the grandness of a perspective that’s revealed to us when we look to God with a heart full of gratitude. And it brings the fulfillment of the Gospel’s promise, “With God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26).