I have always felt a special calling to pray regularly for the world. While I was growing up, my immigrant parents taught my brothers and me to appreciate other cultures. In second grade my Sunday School teacher asked the class to memorize the “Daily Prayer” from the Church Manual (see p. 41). She then asked us to pray it every day. The prayer shows the need for self-examination by yielding to God’s influence in our lives, then reaches out to bless all mankind. Years later another Sunday School teacher emphasized how we could pray for world leaders.
When I turned 18, a friend invited me to join The Mother Church so that I could attend a meeting in Boston being held for college students. I wasn’t particularly interested, but he planted a seed, and the following fall I was accepted into Church membership. It wasn’t until the next year, however, that I joined the Christian Science college organization on campus, an activity provided for in the Manual By-Law “Privilege of Members.”
Our new organization president sparkled with spiritual sense, and that spring I helped prepare for a Christian Science lecture that we were sponsoring for the university, and I brought my boyfriend to the event. By then, the country was getting heated up over the Vietnam War, and students were becoming more politically involved. The lecture, titled “We Can Change Our World,” contained ideas that deepened my spiritual understanding and illustrated the protecting power of daily prayer and its effect on ourselves and others.
