WHEN CHALLENGES IN LIFE SEEM OVERWHELMING, it's encouraging to know that there is a spiritual standard that provides a healing solution to any difficulty. The Scriptures promise us, "When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him" (Isa. 59:19).
The divine standard is based on the spiritual relationship we have to God as His immortal idea, created in His image. Christian Science affirms that God is omniactive, omnipresent, and omnipotent good without a vestige of evil. This infinite good is also divine Mind, the self-existent and eternal Life that has no starting point and no end. The intelligence of this one perfect Mind is expressed as true individual consciousness—as the unique and perpetual identity of each one of us.
Admittedly, one's spiritual selfhood contrasts with the finite, material definition of life that appears to be an amalgamation of good and evil, bracketed by a beginning called birth and an ending called death. Mary Baker Eddy explained this apparent dualism of opposing forces in Science and Health when she wrote: "The continual contemplation of existence as material and corporeal—as beginning and ending, and with birth, decay, and dissolution as its component stages—hides the true and spiritual Life, and causes our standard to trail in the dust" (p. 550).
