All too often we carry around extensive baggage in relation to ourselves. We are like people who go on a day trip but feel they have to pack everything they own. We carry along a self that needs to be defended, a self that needs to be loved, a self that needs to be greatly improved. Sometimes, however, we get stirring glimpses that infinite, divine Love is real. Then we see that this Love is so concrete and so total it puts everything in a new light.
Recognizing divine Love even to a degree, we have the sense Ezekiel described when he tells of God saying, "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you." Ezek. 36:26. At such times we find ourselves strengthened and lifted out of our usual conventional estimates of ourselves. We're able to act on the basis of what we're seeing spiritually. Previously we might have supposed we weren't able to know the truth or to heal because we simply didn't have an individuality that was able. But the lesson from these spiritual experiences is that God Himself supplies our individuality. He creates and gives our true selfhood, and He is showing it to us if we'll listen.
Christian Science, instead of waiting for us to stumble on such experiences often enough to draw the right conclusions, shows us how we can work from the correct conclusion to begin with: that man is literally—and at this very time—the reflection of God's being.
