Have you ever been frustrated with being inconsistent? Have you ever gained a sense of peace, only to find it temporary, snatched away by someone's words or actions or by the announcement of some unexpected event? What can be done? Is there help available? Yes! The solution lies in gaining a deeper awareness of God's constancy, a constancy that begets profound peace and empowers us to demonstrate consistency in our lives.
We may laugh at comic strips that poke fun at the bumbling, self-pitying, forgetful, and lazy traits of mankind, but don't we often accept those same traits as indelible labels attached to both us and our fellowman? Perhaps we sometimes think of consistency as an ephemeral, wishful ideal that is simply out of reach—an ideal that others can achieve but not we ourselves. Why do we think this? Have we accepted that turning to God for answers is irrelevant? To pray would be naive, this line of reasoning suggests, because, after all, we are only human, and to err is to be human! But such rationalization is nothing more than the carnal mind's resistance to any type of spiritual growth. And behind this resistance is often the hidden unwillingness to grow because one realizes that along with spiritual growth comes the concomitant of regeneration, which will force one to discard unnecessary but cherished mental baggage!
Jesus taught, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." Matt. 4:17. This spiritual fact has profound implications for each one of us. For it is in the sincere acceptance of this statement that we start to free ourselves from the mire of self-defeating inconsistency and to experience a better sense of balance in our daily lives through a more spiritualized outlook. Mrs. Eddy, in giving us the key to the Bible in the textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health, has shed new light on the meaning of heaven. In the Glossary (which has Biblical words defined in their spiritual significance) she defines heaven as "harmony; the reign of Spirit; government by divine Principle . . . ." Science and Health, p. 587. We accept, then, that harmony, including Principle's orderly arrangement of all things real, is at hand. And because it is at hand and present right now, it is demonstrable. In reality, there is no lapse from ordered harmony and there is no going to harmony—no falling from and crawling back to harmony, no wishing one were there! God's man, the only real man, lives in and under the law of ordered peace right now.
