Probably many readers have had the experience enjoyed by my husband and me as we drove across the great desert plains of New Mexico. In that lonely area we traveled hour after hour, and as far as the eye could see there were no structures of any size, no trees, or any other obstructions to stop the movement of the tumbleweeds. There were big ones a few feet in diameter and small ones only a few inches across. They rolled, skipped, jumped, and skidded pell-mell cross-country, as the wind bounced them along at a great pace. We would burst out laughing as they flew across the highway as if to outmaneuver us so that we would not run them down, thousands of them, all seeming very much alive and in an enormous hurry!
This picture came into thought one day as prayerful work was being done in Christian Science, and I said to myself, "Thank God, man isn't a tumbleweed, blown hither and yon willy-nilly by the winds of adversity and destruction, or fear and despair, of anger and false appetites."
From a material standpoint, it seems as if man is in just such a predicament a good portion of the time, driven by passions and mad ambition, beset by doubts and fears, and caught up in the whirlwind of selfishness. This false sense of man as mortal, however, is not true, for in reality man is never a mortal; he is an immortal. In Christian Science we learn that man, the man God created in His image and likeness, is entirely separate from the belief of living materially—at the mercy of material compulsion.
