Love urges each of us to extend his prayer beyond personal and local concerns to include the specific and general needs of humanity. But there's more to it than breadth of concern. How deep is our prayerful work for humanity? Though endeavoring to have a wide international outreach, do we not sometimes think too much of small-scale earthbound factors? The scientifically natural premise on which to found our work is that nothing really exists—anywhere—but Spirit and its manifestation.
The seeming depth and complexity of many human problems today cry out for this deepening of our spiritual work for the world. Christ Jesus said, "Ye are the light of the world."Matt. 5:14; The demand is—and each of us can meet it through Christian Science—that we be really lucid about the spiritual factors which help heal a discordant situation, and which destroy the beliefs that claim to operate to produce it.
To expand the practicality of our spiritual treatment for the world, we must continue deepening our work. How can this be done? Well, we may have to advance our thought beyond the process of becoming aware of, say, a major famine in another country and following this with thinking that is insufficiently adjusted to divine reality—thinking that goes no further than, for instance, praying to know that the people out there are loved by God and really have all they need. We must deepen our thought on the basis of Spirit's totality.
