Spiritual Short

To some extent our lives are defined, or at least affected, by religious ideas. Many Christians adopt the viewpoint given in the second chapter of Genesis that man was created materially perfect by God, and then original sin brought man down into imperfection.

Recently I overheard a child, apparently referring to a prior conversation, insist to his mother that he’d told her the truth; it “just wasn’t quite true. ” The mother gently corrected him, explaining that if something isn’t true, it’s not truth.

Don’t you love it when ideas come and bring with them a new level of spiritual understanding? In Psalm 37 , the 37th verse reads, “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace. ” I’d thought that the first word, mark, mostly had to do with vision—to identify, find, behold, or observe.

Yesterday I received a phone call from someone who had a heavy cold and told me that she had identified the “epicenter” of this illness at her job. This got me to thinking about man’s real, spiritual center as the child of God.

A young student in the Christian Science Sunday School knew just where to turn when she was stung by a wasp.

When I was a senior in high school, our Sunday School teacher made us a promise: We could bring any question or any situation troubling us to class and he would help us find an answer from that week’s Christian Science Bible Lesson. He kept his word and in doing so demonstrated to us the inestimable value of studying the Bible Lesson every day.

Haven’t we all yearned to feel God’s presence? Who exactly is this God we want to feel close to? In the book of Revelation, St. John refers to the “seven Spirits which are before his throne” ( 1:4 ).

I found myself asking myself that question one day, and my answer was: to get and to give. What do I want to get? Answer: Inspiration; a better understanding of God; healing.

It was 10:20 one Sunday morning when I arrived at church. The organ prelude had just begun.

On a trip to South Africa, I heard a church member tell of an indigenous daisy ( Gerbera jamesonii) in southern Transvaal that turns its head toward the sunlight. He went out into a field of these flowers to see them all facing the sun.