DURING MY LUNCH BREAK, I received one of those phone calls from the office that you never want to receive—the kind that can be career ending. I had been working in the mortgage banking industry for two years after graduating from college, and had just concluded a very important transaction. Or so I thought. Since I was under the impression that everything had been finalized, I had already passed along the good news to my client and the other parties involved.
What I learned from that phone call, however, was that the final monies that I had told everyone had been transferred had actually been stopped at the last minute due to a bank error, which had not been caught until it was too late. When I returned from lunch, I was going to have to break the bad news to everyone, and the whole deal would almost certainly unravel.
All I could think about was that my client (who also happened to be an important business associate) was going to lose tens of thousands of dollars in deposit money, along with his ability to buy the home he wanted. The people selling the house, who needed the sale money to move, were also going to lose the new home they had agreed to buy. Even though the mistake was not my fault, my business reputation was not likely to recover from this kind of disaster.
I didn't know what to do. Any conceivable scenario to fix the problem would take a minimum of two to four days to accomplish, and I was out of time. After sitting for a while, utterly devastated, I decided to go back to the office and face the music. When I started contacting the necessary people, it all began to go down as I had expected and feared. Everyone was very upset. After finishing the calls, I decided to close the door of my office and do the only thing left to do: Pray. I had experienced God's guidance before in many other aspects of my career, but this time a viable solution seemed impossible.
Sometimes when I do prayerful study and find a passage from the Bible or the writings of Mrs. Eddy that inspires me, I'll write it down so I can take it with me and refer to it throughout the day. The night before, I had found and copied this passage from Miscellaneous Writings: "By purifying human thought, this state of mind permeates with increased harmony all the minutiæ of human affairs. It brings with it wonderful foresight, wisdom, and power; it unselfs the mortal purpose, gives steadiness to resolve, and success to endeavor." Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 204.
This first part of the passage really stood out to me, and I realized that if I was going to find any peace, I needed to begin by purifying my thought. To me this meant that no matter what was going on outside my office door, no matter how out of control things seemed to be, I needed to stop thinking about the circumstances surrounding the problem and instead turn to God and consider only those ideas that would let me feel more of His presence and power.
As my sense of the immensity and presence of God's power grew, my concerns regarding the problem began to fade into the background, and I felt as if I'd found a spot of warm sunlight shining through the clouds in the midst of a heavy storm.
In my effort to accomplish this, I focused on what I believed to be true about God—that as it says in the Bible in the Gospel of John, "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." John 1:3. I contemplated God, Love, governing and guiding all the thoughts and activities of everyone associated with the transaction, reasoning that if Love was the only Creator then it was impossible for anyone to feel beyond the care and control of the one universal Father-Mother.
As my sense of the immensity and presence of God's power grew, my concerns regarding the problem began to fade into the background, and I felt as if I'd found a spot of warm sunlight shining through the clouds in the midst of a heavy storm. Soon, I began to consider that this feeling of harmony was the purified state of mind that Mrs. Eddy had written about.
After a little while, I read over the rest of the paragraph I'd copied, which states: "Through the accession of spirituality, God, the divine Principle of Christian Science, literally governs the aims, ambition, and acts of the Scientist. The divine ruling gives prudence and energy; it banishes forever all envy, rivalry, evil thinking, evil speaking and acting; and mortal mind, thus purged, obtains peace and power outside of itself." Mis., pp. 204–205.
Suddenly, something really wonderful became apparent to me. I recognized that the peaceful state of mind I'd been gaining was not just something to make me feel calm while I helplessly watched the transaction unravel, but that from this new perspective, I could expect to see God actually take control of every facet of the situation. And with God in control, everyone would be blessed. I felt as the prophet Jeremiah must have felt when he said, "Ah Lord God! behold, thou has made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee." Jer. 32:17.
After about an hour of praying with these ideas, there was a knock on my door. One of the escrow officers in charge of coordinating the transaction let me know that a solution had been found to the problem. It was something that even my boss in his 30 years of business had never heard of, and which only could have worked under the very specific circumstances of this situation. Needless to say, I was extremely grateful.
That afternoon, however, I found that I was still worried that this problem would reflect poorly on my reputation. The owner of our affiliate company who had gotten involved was known to hold grudges for lesser things, and I was also concerned that my client/business associate would be unwilling to refer business to me in the future. As these fearful suggestions began creeping back into my thought, I made the effort to regain that same state of purified consciousness, devoid of any sense of fear, anger, or revenge. I knew that if God could overcome that which had seemed so logistically impossible, He also could overturn any other element of inharmony that might creep in to affect me or anybody involved in the transaction.
I returned to the office the next day with a sense of peace and discovered that not only did the owner of the affiliate company appear completely satisfied with my performance, but my client/business associate was also grateful for my efforts throughout the whole process. And as a side note, another problem between the buyer and seller, unrelated to my part in the transaction, also had completely dissolved overnight. The seller had been so angry at one point that he'd hired lawyers and threatened a lawsuit against the buyer and the escrow company. But instead of pursuing that course of action, he dropped the suit and even called both the buyer and the escrow company to express his appreciation for all their good work.
When I think back on that experience, I continue to be amazed at the way everything that had gone wrong with the transaction was resolved in what seemed like the blink of an eye. As a result of my aligning my thought with God's omnipotent goodness, I was able to expect that goodness to become tangible in my everyday life. I am so grateful for the clarity and peace of mind I gained through prayer.
