Big ideas in small packages
Spiritual Short
Recently, instead of being annoyed by the gardener at the park using a noisy weed cutter in an otherwise peaceful environment, I cheerfully remarked, “You think you’ve done your job, and the next time you’re here, the grass has grown again!” We both laughed. As I thought about the grass, I realized that just as it continues to grow, even after being cut down, so do we often feel “cut down” by tragedies, hardship, criticism, and disappointment.
For several years now, I’ve had a nagging regret that I’ve been trying to push under the rug. Each time I think about this certain situation, I feel a deep sense of loss.
There are so many things I loved about attending the Christian Science Sunday School: the pure and holy atmosphere, the opportunity to delve into the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and the spiritual lessons I learned. Sunday School was a place where I was encouraged to take these spiritual lessons and apply them to my life.
Recently I was thinking about efforts being made to try to find the human remains of Christ Jesus—his DNA, his bones. Such efforts would try to deny the Master’s example to us of Life as spiritual and eternal, his resurrection, and his ascension.
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.