Knowing God as our real Friend confers freedom from the belief that constant or frequent contact with personal friends is essential to our happiness. The abiding understanding of ever-present infinite Love includes all real friendship and relationship. Mrs. Eddy writes on page 266 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures": "Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank? Then the time will come when you will be solitary, left without sympathy; but this seeming vacuum is already filled with divine Love. When this hour of development comes, even if you cling to a sense of personal joys, spiritual Love will force you to accept what best promotes your growth." As our understanding of Love's everlasting omnipresence increases, we more easily see why there can be no separation from God, or from loved ones. God's great love for all His creation is manifested in abundant supply for every human need, whether this need is the healing of lack, of loneliness, or of physical discord. Divine Love is found to supply all human needs as we live our understanding of Love in our daily contacts with our fellow men. Love does not gratify mere material desires, or conform to selfish planning or outlining, but tenderly unfolds spiritual good.
No satisfaction or happiness can be compared with that which comes from loving God supremely, as our heavenly Father-Mother, and our neighbor as ourself. Rejoicing in God's ever-presence, with a pure affection for Him, furthers permanent peace, happiness, satisfaction, and success. In this way do we find that any "seeming vacuum is already filled with divine Love." How impossible it is to be lonely when one learns how to be joyously alone with God!
We must learn to "meet every adverse circumstance as its master" (Science and Health, p. 419), by quickly and unflinchingly rejecting all error, and mentally holding to the spiritual facts of man's perfect, harmonious being and oneness with God. Jesus went apart from the multitudes, and even away from his own disciples, to commune with God alone. With Jesus as their example, students of Christian Science learn to protect their privacy so that they may have time daily to go apart and commune with God, alone, not with any sense of cold indifference to or separation from others, but rather to cement the ties of friendship and home, church and business, in a closer, higher bond of love, fellowship, and good will, through the understanding of enduring spiritual relationship.
