So much of what a Christian Science Committee on Publication gets involved in has to do with influence. We all know the term comes with baggage that most people would like to avoid. Who wants to be accused of pushing a personal agenda or manipulating circumstances to work in one’s favor?
But what’s really truly in play? Influence is actually infused with a higher meaning and an enormous potential for doing good. Consider what happens if we think of everyone, including ourselves, as fully equipped to hear new concepts, fresh approaches, higher aims, open to what Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy refers to as “a wider sphere of thought and action” (p. 265). As we position ourselves and our view of others closer to the highest sense of man as referenced throughout Science and Health, our understanding of influence and its potential changes. We see new possibilities and resources where we hadn’t seen them before, all of this the result of an everywhere-present and always-right divine influence to which any one of us is capable of responding.
This means that influence is more about listening than speaking. Listening should come naturally to all of us, of course, but it often seems tough to do with so many demands and distractions around us. That’s one of the reasons I sometimes feel the need to prepare to listen, making sure that I’m honestly longing to know and do the divine will. When I feel in my heart that kind of desire, then I know I’m attentive to the Divine and ready to put my all into the right scale.
