What is supply? Is it, as many people believe, something materially tangible, physically concrete, which must be captured outside of oneself? Christian Science answers these questions with the truth that supply is not something added to man, but is found in the innate fullness and completeness of his being as the perfect representative of God.
The spiritual endowments constituting real selfhood are the measurement of supply. These endowments are limitless, each in its own particular way reflecting the illimitability of God. For instance, there is no end to intelligence, love, strength, purity, or to any other spiritual quality.
To know supply as spiritual does not lessen its tangibility. Rather does it heighten the sense of one's inseparability from it. In truth, supply is our own now, the undeniable, palpably true substance and wholeness of spiritual selfhood. This fact becomes apparent to human sense and demonstrable in human affairs in proportion to the development of one's own ever-present, usable, spiritual talents.
Understanding that supply is spiritual separates supply from the flux of material conditions and establishes it in the permanency of Truth. Any sense of supply built upon materialism, whether pertaining to happiness, health, or things, may be swept away by the floods of mortal belief. But supply demonstrated as man's reflection of God's fullness and completeness cannot be taken away. The stability and abundance of good are provable, retainable, spiritual facts. One can never understand or demonstrate supply as long as he thinks of it as constituted of things. While it is true that divine Love meets the human need and that there are many things which seem necessary in human experience, yet the way to gain the necessities or the refinements of human living is not by fixing a fascinated gaze upon the objects desired.
When oppressed by what to sense seems to be the need of things, we are helped by giving heed to the statement of our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, found on page 4 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," which reads, "What we most need is the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace, expressed in patience, meekness, love, and good deeds." When one is staying close to God in prayer, lifting thought into grateful realization of the affluence of spiritual good with which God has endowed all His creation, the things necessary to human well-being come into one's life at most unexpected times and in surprisingly unlabored ways.
The claim of lack would belittle both God and man. It implies that man is incomplete, that he does not express wholeness, and that he is, or can be, or that God permits him to be, or cannot save him from being, shut off from his rightful heritage of possession and enjoyment of good. Since none of these implications can be true, lack is uncovered as self-assertive evil, the aggression of mortal mind, and not an actual circumstance or condition, as it appears to be.
If the mesmeric belief of lack can persuade one to constantly turn an anxious eye on a lean purse, it can keep one in a state of unhappy limitation, and the purse is likely to grow leaner instead of fatter. What is more disheartening than a chronically thin purse? It says "No" to one's happy anticipations. But Truth, declared, antidotes animal magnetism. Truth breaks the spell of worrisome restriction. It enables one to turn his eyes away from fearful contemplation of the purse and to fix his gaze on reality, the ever-presence of spiritual good.
No element is lacking, no deficiency is present in God's eternal impartation of good to His children. This truth may be proved in every phase of legitimate human living. Jesus knew this; so he considered it no virtue to be poor. His garment was seamless, one of the best obtainable at that time. With his understanding that the substance of every right idea is in Spirit, Jesus was able to make available to the multitude that which satisfied their hunger.
Sometimes a sense of lack springs from failure to recognize present opportunity. In such a case the needed prayer is for more wisdom and discernment whereby to see and embrace the good already at hand. Worthy achievement is in proportion to spiritual enlargement of thought.
Freedom from lack is gained in the same manner that other demonstrations of truth are made—one does one's part and lives the truth he proclaims. Mental apathy, idle talk, self-will, or dreamy wishfulness never helps one to enlarge his sense of supply; this comes only through active, alert awareness and demonstration of God's goodness. In "Miscellaneous Writings" Mrs. Eddy states (p. 307), "God gives you His spiritual ideas, and in turn, they give you daily supplies." Spiritual ideas come to us freely and bountifully. Our part is to use these ideas, share them, make them active and practical in human consciousness. Thus ideas unfold in ever greater significance, power, and fruitage.
Abundance is the inevitable outcome of righteous thinking and doing. Moses knew this and pointed out to his people the good which would flow to them if they kept the Commandments, that is, if they obeyed the moral and spiritual law. He said (Deut. 11:10-12), "The land, whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs: but the land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven: a land which the Lord thy God careth for: the eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year."
These promises are as full of life and vigor to us today as they were to the ancient Hebrews. Loving God and serving Him, we cannot be limited in scope of activity, nor can our achievements be narrowed to a smallness comparable to a garden of herbs. We cannot be made to experience the pressing anxiety of spiritual barrenness and human lack. Nor can undue urgency arise, for by reason of expectant, grateful reliance on God, ample sufficiency for each day is on hand as naturally and as freely as the sun shines.
Man has never been separated from God and His goodness. He has never wandered off into the poverty of material beliefs or surrendered one iota of the unlimited intelligence, love, and honesty which God has bestowed upon him. As one understands these truths, he becomes conscious of his own spiritual worth and of his ability to prove it. Man is never conscious of the coming and going of supply, because in reality it never comes and never goes. Supply is forever present in all its varied aspects of Love's outpouring, signifying the fullness and completeness of man and the universe.
