One night, several years ago, when I returned home, I could not find the matchbox to light my lamp. So I went to take my bath in the darkness. As soon as I started washing myself, I felt a sting on my right foot. I was instantly in sharp pain. But just as quickly, before I even tried to figure out what had happened, an event from the apostle Paul’s life came spontaneously to my mind. The event is described in the Bible, in Acts, chapters 27 and 28.
When Paul, as a prisoner, was being transferred by boat to Italy, the ship was destroyed in a storm. Saved by divine Providence, all the crew and passengers, including Paul, found themselves on the island of Melita. To feed the fire that the kind people of the island had started in order to dry and warm up the shipwrecked strangers, Paul picked up some sticks. As he laid the sticks on the fire, a viper came out and bit him. Paul simply shook the viper off and did not feel any harm. The people of the island expected him to die quickly. But after waiting for quite a while, they noticed that nothing was happening to Paul, and they said that he was a god.
Was he really a god? The people of the island thought that he was extraordinary, invulnerable. But in fact, Paul understood that he was spiritual, the expression of God. Materiality could not touch his spiritual nature. He knew that he was not a god, but that he was created in the image and likeness of God. I thought about what Mary Baker Eddy explains in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent” (p. 300).
