Tell the Truth

Archive for February, 2006

I’ve been up in the air the last few days and aren’t quite sure how to write about this…

I received a call Sunday morning from my daughter-in-law telling me my son had spent the night in jail, and asking me to bail him out. It turns out that they got into an argument Saturday afternoon and someone called the police and reported a domestic assault. When the police came to arrest him, they found a pipe on him, and so he was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and simple possession of narcotics. He will be arraigned next Tuesday. In the meantime, he has a temporary restraining order on him and he can’t talk to his wife or see her. He’s staying in a motel for the moment. Yesterday, he was fired from his job for not showing up to work or calling on Saturday, and their landlady told my daughter-in-law that they have 30 days to move out. Rough stuff for a 19 and a 20 year old to be going through, and rough stuff for me as well.

I’ve talked to them both and both are saying that there was no abuse, that they were just yelling at each other. She says that he never threatened her or hurt her. But then she also asked, “Is he mad with me?” That sounded creepy to me — like an abused wife. I love them both, but I’ve heard that many abused wives are in denial, so I don’t know how much to trust their perceptions.

Where is God in all this?

I talked to my practitioner yesterday and here’s what she said…

Even when you don’t know what to do, the Holy Spirit knows what the need is. Get on your knees and ask Him. God knows their needs; He is their Father-Mother.

He belongs to God, and God has a purpose for him. Anytime something like this happens, it is always a wakeup call. Man’s extremity is always God’s opportunity. Remember that “All things work together for good for them that love God…” and God is right there with him. God’s plan is to bring him to know God’s purpose for him, and until he knows it, his life will not go well.

We should pray for our children daily. God will bless and guide the children of the righteous. Be at peace.

I have to choose which way I want to go with this. Do I want to focus on the problems and end up making myself miserable? Or am I willing to think a new thought? That’s what Rev. Lora Beth asks us to do: think a new thought. So far I’ve been bouncing back and forth between worry and prayer, worry and platitudes, worry and looking for God in the situation.

So far worry has been winning, but I haven’t given up. I will overcome the worry. (This too shall pass.) It makes me look at what’s really important in my life. I can’t live my son’s life, but I can live my own, and for me that means reaching out to God and not be taken off track by this crisis, or anything else. In the meantime, I’m going over and over the above ideas. They help quiet my mind and sooth my aching heart. Some.

These wonderful passages are taken from the 1st edition of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by (then) Mary Baker Glover (Eddy).

We reason wrong on all points relating to God and man, Soul and body, when we start from matter to draw conclusions of Spirit; this renders it impossible for such conclusions to be correct.

Some examples came to mind for me — Seeing God as present more at one moment than at another; seeing ourselves as “becoming” or “over the hill”, etc. instead of our reflecting God’s perfection as fully present at every moment; reasoning about God from observing nature, ex. seeing animals eat one another and drawing the conclusion that God is indifferent to our pain and vulnerability, etc. These are all wrong conclusions drawn from our “mortal” experience and observations of life.

Our present standpoint is body not Soul, personality instead of Principle, hence our mistaken views and their consequences in sin, sickness and death.

It’s a bit like trying to understand the principle of mathematics from looking over the shoulders of a class of 4th graders struggling with their arithmetic. We factor in the arithmetic mistakes into our understanding of the principle of mathematics. We can never understand it correctly this way! We must start from principle, even though our experience doesn’t seem to authenticate it.

We go into ecstacies over a personal God with scarcely a spark of Love in the heart, when God is Love; and with scarcely a ray from Truth, when God is Truth; and without the understanding of Life, when God is Life, and what is the result? That we have no practical God to heal us; and get out of sin and death only in belief, while they still cling to mortal man; this is not science or the Christianity that heals the sick and demonstrates the harmony of Life.

This hypocracy comes from assenting to a creed or doctrine as being true. We must “worship God in Spirit and Truth” as Jesus said, not in belief and creed. Correct belief will never heal sin, or disease, or raise anyone from the dead! The important thing isn’t the BELIEF that we should be loving, or truthful, or holy; the important thing is the BEING of them. No outward appearances matter; what matters is the heart.

Evil and good never constituted man, for man is the image of God, and all there is to him is the good; evil is not the image and likeness of God, or matter of Spirit, even reason would rescue man from these errors of personal sense were it not silenced by some fatal theory.

As the book of James says, “ Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?” If we reason from principle, this is obvious. If we reason from our personal sense, like reasoning the principle of mathematics from the work of a grade-schooler, we will find this absurd and unexplicable. But holding to the principle, will bring it into our experience, and we will awaken to God’s perfect creation, and God’s infinite Love.

The following is an article originally published in Healing Thoughts, the Independent Christian Science magazine published by the Plainfield Christian Science Church. It was written by George White, the father of Mrs. Evans, the teacher at Plainfield, and who was a Christian Science Practitioner. This is from the November 1989 issue…

No matter what the trouble may seem to be, health, finances, lawsuit, quarrel, house on fire, or anything else, stop thinking about it and think about God and God’s qualities instead. Declare the truth about God and man. Turn the thought to God and hold it there. Stop thinking about the trouble whatever it is, and turn absolutely to God. The object is to drive the thought of the difficulty right out of your mind. Push whatever is disturbing out of consciousness, whether it be a person, condition or thing, and substitute God’s thoughts.

Be constantly repeating some statement of absolute Truth, such as: “There is no power but God; I am a child of God filled and surrounded by the perfect peace of God. God is guiding and protecting me now. God is with me.” However mechanical or dead it may seem at first, you will soon find that the treatment has begun to take, and that your mind is clearing. Do not struggle violently. Be quiet but insistent. Each time that you find your attention wandering, just switch it back to God. Do not outline; leave the ways and means to God. You want to get out of the difficulty; that is sufficient. You do your half by holding thought steadfastly to God, and God will never fail to do His.

The responsive reading from our lesson sermon this week is taken from Romans 8. There are many inspiring verses here:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose. (v. 28) Who shall separate from the love of Christ? (v. 35) Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. (v. 37)

To me this is saying that everything that’s happening in our lives: every condition, every circumstance, every Truth we’re learning, every step forward, and every seeming delay, is working with us to bring more of God, good into our lives. Nothing can keep our good from us — no one and no thing.

It promises that we are assured of victory over our present problems, for they only exist that the “work of God should be made manifest” in our lives. God is using our present circumstances to draw us deeper into His love.

We are so blessed!

Embosomed deep in Thy dear love,
Held in Thy law, I stand:
Thy hand in all things I behold,
And all things in Thy hand.
Thou leadest me by unsought ways,
Thou turn’st my mourning into praise.

On last week’s class tape, Mrs. Evans, the teacher at Plainfield Christian Science Church, shares the story of a little boy and a man standing before a great statue. The man looked for a while and finally said, “That doesn’t look so great to me.”

The little boy said, “But, sir, you’re not looking at it right. You must step forward and kneel down — then look up.” When the man did as the boy suggested, and looked, he saw the statue’s beautiful face for the first time.

So with us. We must step forward toward God, Truth, humble ourselves, and raise our consciousness to God. Only then can we see aright: “Perfect God, perfect man, and perfect universe.”

Listen (mp3)

I look to Thee in every need,
And never look in vain;
I feel Thy touch, eternal Love,
And all is well again:
The thought of Thee is mightier far
Than sin and pain and sorrow are.

Thy calmness bends serene above,
My restlessness to still;
Around me flows Thy quickening life
To nerve my faltering will:
Thy presence fills my solitude;
Thy providence turns all to good.

Embosomed deep in Thy dear love,
Held in Thy law, I stand:
Thy hand in all things I behold,
And all things in Thy hand.
Thou leadest me by unsought ways,
Thou turn’st my mourning into praise.

Hymn 134, from the Christian Science Hymnal.

In her address on “The Word Made Flesh” by Martha Wilcox, she has a wonderful, thought provoking discussion of our misconceptions of mind:

I believe that there is not one student in a hundred who does not insist that the mind he now has, is mortal mind. The student may have been declaring for twenty years, “God is my Mind,” but nevertheless he still believes that the mind he now has, is mortal mind.

In Christian Science, “mortal” anything is an illusion, a misconception of reality — and an illusion has no existence. Likewise, our misconception of who and what we are has no existence, and even though like the hypnotist’s subject, we may walk around the stage struting like a chicken, we aren’t one. That’s exactly Christian Science’s view of mortality: We are walking around under the hypnotic belief that we are subject to sin, disease and death, but they’re no more real than the chicken feathers we may think we have when we’re clucking about on stage. And believing that we have a mortal mind leads us to try and “get rid” of it, rather than demonstrating that we have the only Mind there is, God.

Because the student believes the mind he now has, is mortal mind, he thinks he must get rid of it through treatment, and if he starts with getting rid of the mind he now has, he isn’t starting to fulfill the mind he now is.

There is only one Mind, so the Mind you now have is God, the only Mind. It is true that you need to subordinate your fleshly perceptions about it, but nevertheless, the Mind that is here now, is the only Mind.

We want to get rid of the chicken feathers (our problem), but don’t realize that it’s not real, so we turn to medicine which tells us what other people who believed they were chickens have done to get rid of their feathers and we take a pill, hoping to get our skin back. Since our feathers are only there in belief, we hope that another belief (a pill that will cure us) will make things right again. And perhaps the pill works and we’re “cured”, and that’s a wonderful thing.

The problem is that we’re still hypnotized with the belief that we’re a chicken and although we got rid of our feathers, we could grow a beak any day! The real solution to our problem is to wake up! Wake up to our reality as a child of God. Wake up to what it means to be fashioned in the image and likeness of Love itself. Wake up to the “Good News” that God has for us: that we are not subject to sin, disease and death, that God does not condemn us for our sins, that God is with us always and that His divine Love supplies all our needs.

That’s the good news of Christian Science, and Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures is the textbook that teaches us how to wake up.