Tell the Truth

Archive for August, 2009

This past month I had an invitation to sing at Unity Church of the Cumberlands in Cookeville, TN.

Here are a couple of songs that I did that you might enjoy.

The first one is “Into Your Hands”. It’s a song I wrote for a “Burning Bowl” service for Unity Church of Knoxville three or four years ago. I wrote a new verse and changed another for this service.

The second is my favorite song to sing—”Not One Negative Thought”. Listen and you’ll see why!

Isaiah 42:6-7 (KJV)
6 I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles;
7 To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

I’ve been going through hell at work, and this description of a prisoner sitting in darkness in his prison is an apt description.

I was given a new programming project to work on. It is a high priority project which uses a technology I’m unfamiliar with. I felt inadequate, incompetent and frightened. I found myself avoiding working on the project and instead, looking for other things to do. I knew it was fear, and reminded myself frequently that, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind,” but I just couldn’t get past it. I argued with myself, asked God’s help, prayed with two different practitioners, and wrestled with it every way I knew how.

Today, I’m rejoicing! I’m free of the fear. I’m not trapped in the prison anymore. I’m no longer sitting in the darkness.

My freedom began Sunday evening when the thought came to me… You’re inadequate, incompetent and frightened. Why did God do this to you? Why did God send you a project that you can’t handle. What is His motivation? I couldn’t think of any reason, and I realized that God wouldn’t do this to me.

Why then would God do this to the other people on the project? Why would He send them a programmer that couldn’t handle the work? Was he trying to frustrate them? Was he punishing them? No. God wouldn’t do that either. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that God is not going about frustrating people–Love wouldn’t do that. If God sent those people to me for support on their project, it was because He knew I could bless them.

I thought of the 23rd Psalm.

Psalms 23:5 (KJV)
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Right in the midst of this situation, God has prepared everything I need. He has chosen me for His purpose, and is blessing me beyond my capacity to receive.

Then yesterday morning I read this passage from 2 Timothy:

2 Tim 1:9 (KJV)
Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began,

Here I say that it was God who had sent this work to me–not my boss, not my company, but that it was given to me “according to his own purpose and grace” and that the project was a blessing—not a curse.

Deuteronomy says,

Deut 11:26-28 (KJV)
26 Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse;
27 A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you this day:
28 And a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not known.

God had set this project before me. It could be a blessing or a curse. If I chose to embrace this “according to his own purpose and grace”, it would be a blessing to me; but if I kept God out of the picture and saw it as coming to me from my boss, instead of God, then I would see it as a curse—which is what I had been doing. This is why I had been sitting in the darkness of the prison of fear.

With this realization, the fear dissolved and my peace was restored.

Psalms 3:3 (KJV)
But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.

And that’s the truth!

If our hearts are not filled with joy each time we think of God, our eyes are blind!

Luke 8:10 (NCV)
Jesus said, “You have been chosen to know the secrets about the kingdom of God. But I use stories to speak to other people so that: ’They will look, but they may not see. They will listen, but they may not understand.’

We must rouse ourselves to have a heart of praise! And here are some reasons taken from scripture:

He keeps me from doing wrong
He protects me from evil
He saves me
His steadfast love endures forever
His mighty acts
His immense greatness

Romans 1:21 (GW)
They knew God but did not praise and thank him for being God. Instead, their thoughts were pointless, and their misguided minds were plunged into darkness.

His wondrous help
The health of my countenance
His excellent greatness
His strength
For everything he has done
For the many good things he has given me
For his goodness to the people of Israel
For the beauty/splendor of his holiness
His mercy endures forever/is everlasting

Psalms 100:5 (AMP)
For the Lord is good; His mercy and loving-kindness are everlasting, His faithfulness and truth endure to all generations.

For the favor he has show me
For his goodness
He is upright in all that he has done for me
All his deeds are true
All his ways right
All his judgments are true
He has snatched me from the burning fiery furnace, he has drawn me from the heart of the flame!
He has demonstrated his unfailing love for me
He alone does mighty miracles
He alone made the heavens

Psalms 111:10 (NJB)
His praise will continue for ever.

He led his people through the wilderness
He saved his people from the power of mighty kings
He remembered my utter weakness (and helped me)
He has saved me from my foes
He gives food to every living thing
He issued his command and all creation came into being
He always loves me
He sets me free from my sins (negative thoughts and self-destructive acts)

Psalms 95:1-7 (CEV)
Sing joyful songs to the Lord!
Praise the mighty rock where we are safe.
Come to worship him
with thankful hearts and songs of praise.

The Lord is the greatest God, king over all other gods.
He holds the deepest part of the earth in his hands,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
The ocean is the Lord’s because he made it,
and with his own hands he formed the dry land.

Bow down and worship the Lord our Creator!
The Lord is our God, and we are his people,
the sheep he takes care of in his own pasture.
 
Listen to God’s voice today!

The material history of man is the story of man separated from God, (186:9) but man is the reflection of God and cannot be separated from God for an instant.

“The material, mortal history is but the record of dreams, not of man’s real existence.” RET 21:13-15 It is the history of numbers separated from the principle of mathematics they were created to express.

Like numbers apart from the principle of mathematics are meaningless, “Mere historic incidents and personal events are frivolous and of no moment, unless they illustrate the ethics of Truth.” RET 21: 25-27

Error would try to make material history as real and living as spiritual history, as it tries to make error as real as Truth, or evil as real as good. (204:3)

But the history of error must be a lie even as the error is a lie. What is the history of 2+2=5? When did it begin? How did it develop? Such a history is an illusion, every bit as false as it’s premise. “The true theory of the universe, including man, is not in the material history but in spiritual development.” 547:23

Courageous Man Refuses To Believe He Has Cancer

This spoof is from the Onion…

The intellect has been a difficult thing for me to get under control. It is a wonderful gift, a quality of Mind, but  governed by mortal mind, it is deceptive, and an enemy of my spiritual growth.

One day, after lunch, I was wasting time. I knew in the back of my mind that God wanted me to be productive, but there I was surfing the net instead of working. Finally, I became so uncomfortable that I had to get up from my computer. I thought, I’ll take a break, walk around the parking lot and meditate on doing God’s will. As I walked down the hall, I thought, “No!, What I need to do is to sit down and do some work!” The intellect is always trying to get us to think about our spirituality, rather than living it.

Recently, I woke up feeling out of sorts and mildly depressed. I recognized right away that this was not God’s plan for my life. There is only one Mind, divine Mind, and that Mind is never depressed. The intellect told me that I needed to see everything that happened that day as the unfoldment of good, and I walked out of the house with that intention. As we all have experienced, resolutions to do better don’t work. How many New Year’s resolutions have you kept? Zero, I’ll bet! The intellect would always have us resolve to do better instead of taking action which would have an immediate effect.

Fortunately, I have a practitioner who saw through this immediately. He gave me this advice: “You saw that the feeling was a lie. Good. Now, don’t make a resolution to take some future action, take a statement of Truth right now and stick with it until that feeling lifts. Kick error in the teeth! Truth always wins!”

We discussed that when I’m under attack by a negative thought it may be hard to think of statements of Truth or remember the action that I need to take. Afterwards, I wrote down some notes that came from our discussion and put them in my wallet for future use. Then I took a statement of Truth from the Bible lesson and worked with it until the fog lifted.

Mrs. Eddy describes in Science and Health how some people mistake remorse and a resolution to do better in the future as adequate to handle their sinful behavior. The problem she says is that in spite of their sentiments, they don’t change their behavior. They sin and repent, sin and repent and never make the needed change. That is a wonderful description of the rut that the intellect would lead us into. Our need is change—not resolutions, and not remorse.

If we’re feeling how wonderful it would be to feel close to God, we need to move our attention to God right now and begin talking with Him and listening to Him right now.

If we think, “I am not going to fall into that trap in the future”, we need begin to practice constant awareness of what we’re thinking, what Mrs. Eddy calls watching, right now.

If we think, “I wish I was a better Christian Scientist”, we need to practice our Science right now, in the midst of whatever is going on. If we are listening to the news, we can know the truth that God governs. If we see someone misbehaving, we can know that they are, in reality, the expression of God, and that their behavior isn’t what they are reflecting as God’s child; and if God leads us to, we can correct them. If we’re experiencing pain, we can know that we are God’s reflection and that God is never in pain, and we are reflecting His harmony.

Look for ways to practice Christian Science, and be grateful for every problem. Every one of them is an opportunity that can lead us to see our need for God’s help and a reminder for us to seek His presence.

Get out of the intellect, and get closer to God!  As Yoda told Luke in Star Wars, “Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.”

When I trust God to show me what I need to see,
tell me what I need to know,
take me where I need to be
then life can be full of amazing and beautiful surprises.

Marceil DeLacy

God looks beyond the things I do during the day that don’t measure up and constantly leads me back to a clear sense of what I need to do.

This testimony of an overnight healing of mouth cancer, sent in from one of the members of the Plainfield church, was read last night at the testimony meeting.

Click here to listen to the mp3 file.

This service as well as others may be heard at the website of the Plainfield Christian Science Church, Independent.

I’ve got a cartoon in my office. It shows two rats in a cage. One is running on his wheel and the other is sittiing down on his. The one sitting down says to the other one, “I’ve had an epiphany!” Well, I’ve had an epiphany, too.

It started last Thursday. I woke up and had a wonderful time studying the lesson. When I left for work at 6:30 I felt inspired and was looking forward to a wonderful day. But by 8 o’clock I was in the depths of depression and didn’t think I could make it until lunch time. I felt like Alice—I had gone down the rabbit hole!

I emailed my practitioner and asked for help and by lunch time I had pulled out of it. Late in the afternoon, although I wasn’t depressed, I still felt vulnerable.

Friday morning, I began to see that life was like navigating through a mine-field—no, actually a “mind”-field, where we are continually presented with challenges. We are either squelching them or feeding them with our consciousness.

The state of consciousness that will squelch them is divine Mind. Every challenge we meet through God, we can overcome. God is a solid rock (of consciousness) that we can cling to. It will hold us solidly through any wind and storm that may come.

I got the point through my experience. In the days ahead, I will find out how well I learned my lesson.