IN all God's universe, and there is no other, nothing is lost. Nothing real, no true idea or individuality, is ever lost. To human sense there is loss, but this apparent loss arises from and takes place only in a mortal misconception of life and selfhood. Nothing in God's universe has changed. If for a time we do not see this clearly, our experience may include a sense of loss, grief or disappointment, resentment or incomprehension. But each one of us may rule these out of his experience forthwith. There is no time limit on a change of thinking. If we honestly and earnestly turn to God with Elijah's prayer for the young man, applying it to ourselves (II Kings 6: 17), "Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see," our prayer will be granted.
The ill effects of any material sense of loss, whether it concerns possessions, home, health, friends, or business, can be corrected and eventually eliminated as we turn thought away from materiality to the contemplation of God's spiritual universe and the immutable completeness of man. The specific right idea to meet the problem at hand will always be supplied if we are faithful in our study and honest in our lives. Newcomers to Christian Science, as well as those who have traveled this path for many years, have found instant help from an appropriate Bible text or passage from our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy.
A young Christian Scientist was burdened by a sense of anxiety concerning some family property which had been inherited. There were heavy debts involved, and all human forecasts about the situation were gloomy. Since she was not responsible for the disposal of the property, she was tempted to avoid all further thought about it. But she awoke to see that she was responsible for correcting her own frightened sense of things. As she prayed for light, these statements from the Christian Science textbook (p. 548) came to her thought: "In this Science, we discover man in the image and likeness of God. We see that man has never lost his spiritual estate and his eternal harmony." She saw very clearly in that moment that man was never concerned with a material estate, and therefore he could never lose one; that her spiritual estate was intact and inseparable from heaven or harmony.
