I felt beaten. Two years of preparing to make Christian Science healing my full-time profession, and it looked as though everything was falling apart. I had resigned my job, and so a significant portion of our family's regular income had stopped. We had planned to move across country, and our house was for sale, but months had passed with no one making an offer to purchase it. My wife had been told she would have work waiting for her in our new community, but it looked like that, too, would not happen after all.
Then one Sunday morning in early July, I attended a committee meeting just before the start of the church service. At that meeting the chairperson read remarks that Mary Baker Eddy had prepared for Sunday services on July 4. Those remarks pierced right through the defeat I had been feeling: "Never was there a more solemn and imperious call than God makes to us all, right here, for fervent devotion and an absolute consecration to the greatest and holiest of all causes. The hour is come."
Those last four words resonated in me. Even though the reading continued, all I could think about was that "the hour is come." But what more could I do? The house wasn't selling, we weren't moving, and the future looked more grim with each passing day.
