Autumn in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California is a season of preparation—of getting ready for the upcoming blanketing snows and storing up supplies to get through the cold months with their shorter days of sunlight. One day, after working all day cutting, splitting, and moving large timber for firewood, a 50-pound chunk of wood I was moving out of a trailer fell about five feet directly onto the little finger of my left hand. It was apparent when I removed my leather work glove that the finger was not only discolored but also broken.
Immediately I put my glove back on and sat down to pray to see the truth of this incident. We are bombarded daily by hundreds of things that the world says are inevitable—disease, financial and family problems, accidents, cruelty, etc. But following a Christian Science lecture at our church a few days earlier, I had been praying about the concept of inevitability and how the divine laws of God abolish the so-called laws of nature.
I had been studying the account in the Bible that tells us about Christ Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (see John 11:1–44). We read that Lazarus had been dead four days before Jesus arrived. At the time, the popular Jewish belief was that a person’s spirit would remain with or near the corpse for three days. By restoring and raising Lazarus after four days had passed, Jesus proved that God’s law truly is the only law, constant and always in operation.
