In one of his parables, recorded in the fifteenth chapter of Luke, Jesus tells of a younger son who demanded his share of the patrimony and left his father's home to go to a far country. There he "wasted his substance with riotous living," and eventually returned impoverished. Jesus emphasizes the points that the son left his home, took his substance away with him, used it unwisely, and then had nothing, because he had separated himself from the source of good and thus had no means of replenishment.
Then Jesus relates the steps which mark the prodigal's return to his proper estate: he "came to himself": he reviewed his blessings as a son in his father's house; he arose, repented, or changed his thinking, and resolutely turned his steps homeward. Although he had seemed to be far away, he found that his status as a son had remained unchanged, that his father had never thought of him as anything but his beloved son, and that his home was intact.
The parable brings to light the truth of man's eternal relationship to his heavenly Father as a son and the fact that man is ever with God. Divine Mind is man's Father; man, being an idea of this Mind, is never absent or separated from Mind. In "Pulpit and Press" Mary Baker Eddy writes (p. 4), "You have simply to preserve a scientific, positive sense of unity with your divine-source, and daily demonstrate this." As we attain and preserve this sense, we realize man's oneness, or unity, with all good, with divine Life and Love, with intelligence and substance. Since man is one with Mind as its idea, he lives in Mind— he inhabits it. Mind is his eternal abode.
