It came quietly at first … a few drops of rain, a slick spot here and there. Shortly the storm came and so did the ice, until there was a full thunderstorm and ice thickly coating almost everything.
Quickly, night fell. Through the night, I could hear branches breaking off the trees from the heaviness of the ice, sounding like gun shots. I was more than ready for the morning as dawn crept up slowly. As the sun came up brightly into the clear blue sky, the world around me was dazzling like crystal. The thought came quickly to me that although this was beautiful, this beauty was mythical because the ice had done so much damage to the trees. As the sun began to melt the ice, I learned many lessons. The ice and the sun became metaphors for me.
The first lesson I learned was that what Christian Science calls an “aggressive mental suggestion,” a suggestion from erring mortal mind (Mary Baker Eddy, Manual of The Mother Church, p. 42), can come so slowly that I don’t notice it coming. Then before I know it, the suggestion of sickness, lack, sin, has grown into such a “big” belief that it has coated my sense of who I really am as God’s child. This coating makes me feel heavy, out of sorts, and uneasy. And this influences everything I look at. My days are heavy and burdensome. Joy has fled.
