January 1992 doesn't seem like the beginning of just another new year. Remarkable events have been occurring throughout the world. Democracy is setting deeper roots in the Americas, in Eastern Europe, in the republics that had constituted the Soviet Union. Yet there's profound uneasiness as people realize more fully that forming and reforming nations is like individual reformation—easier to conceive than to carry through to completion.
Vision is needed, spiritual vision that goes much further than discontent with the past. In a handful of poignant words the Bible states what has become clear: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Prov. 29:18. Whether one is making a home for a family, actively at work for church, or building a new nation with democratic foundations and firm resolve to honor human rights, people need vision, a clear idea of where they're headed.
Yet what are we to do when the distance and challenge of the journey threaten to overwhelm resolve and resources? A man who recently lost his home in a flood wrote with courageous humor that comes from more than a little spiritual vision: "I felt I had come to the end of my rope. I had no choice but to tie a knot at the end and hold on."
Another friend, living hundreds of miles away, has been through different but no less challenging times—unemployment, mounting debts, children to care for, a house in severe need of repair.
Both of these people are Christian Scientists. The remarkable thing is, however, that even while certain aspects of their lives have seemed devastating, both have found as a result of prayer that their vision was expanding rapidly. The second friend wrote recently, telling of the changes that have come to her and her family and of previously unknown strength and goodness that have been found in the middle of heart-rending experiences.
God has not created difficulties to test His creation, man. The truth is that man can never be lost from God.
"I am very grateful for the insight we've gained into the life of . . . the families around us. There are those ... [even] worse off financially than we've been, and yet they still share with others. Now I know how hard that can be for some. But they still give to others without a second thought .... The beauty all around me has been made more obvious by the experience we've been having. Love is more apparent everywhere .... There is a new peace surrounding me, which, if not constantly visible, is at least deeper and purer than any I've known...."
The spiritual vision that sustains life and overcomes the sometimes crushing challenges that threaten to turn back progress is not an imaginary, merely idealistic thing. It is the outcome of an innate spiritual sense that we possess because man is the spiritual child of God. When we think of life as material, the fear of human loss overhangs our lives. Thinking that difficulties are created by God, we may feel adrift like a boat that has broken from its moorings during a typhoon. But God has not created difficulties to test His creation, man. The truth is that man can never be lost from God, who is man's real Life, Mind, and Soul. Christian Science affirms the radical fact that we can seize this truth and draw daily strength and wisdom from it—spiritual strength and wisdom that make it possible for us to overcome (as Christ Jesus taught us how) the fear, the mistakes, and the shortcomings that confront us and the world.
The vision that is crucial comes from an understanding of man as God's spiritual image and likeness, wholly expressing the very essence of divine Love. This vision makes it possible for people not simply to survive in the world but to prevail and to make real progress in meeting the world's great needs through a spiritual understanding of God's law and of man as His spiritual creation.
Writing in Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy envisioned the spiritual meaning of man's life as the child of God. 'As God is substance and man is the divine image and likeness," she writes, "man should wish for, and in reality has, only the substance of good, the substance of Spirit, not matter...."
She continues: "The material body and mind are temporal, but the real man is spiritual and eternal. The identity of the real man is not lost, but found through this explanation; for the conscious infinitude of existence and of all identity is thereby discerned and remains unchanged It is impossible that man should lose aught that is real, when God is all and eternally his." Science and Health, pp. 301, 302.
God, who is our Life, supplies the vision. This is the real reason we can't lose what is essential, including the strength and divine Love that sustain all life. Christ Jesus had this vision, and with it he demonstrated the practical meaning of man's identity as God's child. This truth of man's genuine nature is what makes spiritual vision more than a hope. It's a necessity and an inevitability. Once we catch sight of our unity with God, there's no turning back healing and reformation in us or in the world. To borrow the words of the Christian Scientist who wrote of her family's experience, something "deeper and purer" than we've ever known awaits us in 1992.
