Articles

Two years ago , my family and I moved across the country. While it was a move that would prove to have so much good in store for us, I was now much farther from my parents, and that pained me.

At one time , while I was reading the Bible Lesson found in the Christian Science Quarterly, the thought came to me that my spiritual progress seemed to have stalled. Although the Lesson was still an important part of my daily study, I needed a new perspective.

“Love more,” she said. This came from someone who made a big impact on my life.

God’s love is meteoric,         his loyalty astronomic, His purpose titanic,         his verdicts oceanic. Yet in his largeness         nothing gets lost; Not a man, not a mouse,         slips through the cracks.

How do you really know when spiritually scientific healing has taken place? Don’t look to your body; look to your thought. When your thought has changed and become more spiritual, the human evidence can’t help but respond with a greater sense of harmony.

As part of a Bible study group, I recently looked more closely at Jesus’ parable of the kingdom of heaven being “like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away” ( Matthew 13:47, 48 ). This started me thinking about what I had been doing of late—dragging up old memories and sorting them: the good, spiritually based ones to keep, and the hurtful, mortal ones to let go.

As a means of self-improvement, I have been doing a refreshing exercise lately: Throughout my day, I am simply noting every single instance when I mistakenly think or say something that would suggest evil is a real and acting power. I was prompted to begin this exercise when I read of Christ Jesus’ response to Pilate after he declared that he had the power to bring about Jesus’ death.

Christ Jesus said, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise” ( John 5:19 ).   Jesus didn’t say that he could do nothing, but that without his heavenly Father he had no power.

In the days before you could snap a photo with your cellphone and send it off immediately or post it for all the world to see, I left my home on Long Island, New York, and headed off to college in Oregon.   One of the first things I did was take a day trip to the beautiful Oregon coast with its magnificent cliffs, so different from the beaches that I was used to.

Over the past eight and a half years, the members of First Church of Christ, Scientist, Newport Beach, California, have had the inspiring opportunity of witnessing God’s plan unfold in ways mere human planning could not foresee or accomplish.   Knowing our church building of seventy years would be sold in December 2012, we began holding “spiritual cultivation” workshops to deepen our understanding of the concept of Church.