Spiritual Short

Recently I met with a university student for ten weeks as part of her class assignment to interact with a senior citizen. She shared how she loved her theology class, and I shared how I love the Bible and the book that makes it so practical— Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy.

My four-year-old daughter and I were in our car heading to the park, when she noticed I was feeling worried and asked if she could sing a song. The first words she sang were, “God is the hum of life.

You sometimes hear it said that someone is “a pillar of the church,” implying that this one’s devotion and service are so substantial that he or she is an essential support for their church. Such a position can seem to be a great burden at times and make for a sense of weariness or imposition.

In the Bible, Christ Jesus tells a man who is seeking eternal life to “go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven” ( Mark 10:21 ). I had always thought of this verse as a requirement of sacrifice, but in the wake of losing several loved ones, I found these words become a gift that helped me understand eternal life.

Before our grandchildren could talk, our daughter taught them to deal with their minor toddler falls with a simple “Brush it off!” She illustrated this by brushing her hands together, an action the children quickly picked up and often used as a means of showing that they understood when something was a nonissue. Brushing those hands together has become, for me, symbolic of brushing off the “dust man,” the mortal man described in the second chapter of Genesis.

I was driving to the beach to go surfing, when I saw a myna bird lying in the middle of the road. After pulling over, I picked up the bird and found it was still alive but not moving.

In a recent Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson, the familiar story of Eve listening to the suggestion of the serpent hit me like a bolt of lightning. In Genesis 3, the serpent subtly draws Eve into a dialogue that results in both Eve and Adam eating fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil—fruit that the Lord God had said would make them mortal (see verses 1–6 ).

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.

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.

A few years ago I was texting with a business colleague late one evening, and she apologized for not getting back to me sooner, saying, “Another kid has joined the flu train and it’s getting ugly. ” She had three young children and a very active household, and I could hear the stress and worry she was feeling about the coming days.