You don't ever have to feel hemmed in —by your job, or personal relationships, or finances, or by the lack of opportunity to be the "great" person you know you are. Your identity really is spiritual. In truth it's free of the constrictions of human life that would hem us all in.
There were times, both before and after she discovered Christian Science, that Mary Baker Eddy must have felt hemmed in by the confining sphere of human circumstances. For example, when still a young woman but already a widow with a small boy to care for, she wrote this in a letter: "I feel as if I must begin something this summer, if my health is sufficient. . . . I want to learn to play on a piano so that I can go south and teach. Tis all I shall ever be able to do, and this once accomplished and I am independent. . . . O, how I wish I had a Father that had been ever willing to let me know something. . . ." Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966), pp. 82-83;
How was Mrs. Eddy lifted out of this life of narrow possibilities she had in small-town New England? Well, she wasn't lifted out of it immediately—not for a long time, not until she'd experienced much of both the joy and suffering of day-to-day human living.
