It was so dark as I walked along the street that I couldn’t see the ground. Then I heard a voice, as if someone were talking right next to me. “You are God’s loved child,” it said.
I was 15 years old, and I was walking with my friends to the closest convenience store so we could find someone to buy us beer. We had smoked all the marijuana we had, and we were thirsty.
Smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, and consuming other illegal drugs had become a regular activity for us. But this night was different. As we walked in the dark, I heard the “voice.” I turned to see who was speaking, but no one was there.
It had been two years since I had attended a Christian Science Sunday School. I had been taught from a young age that God is Love, and that this Love would always be with me and guide me. However, I had never felt or experienced this Love myself, though I had heard other people tell about its presence in their lives.
That night, it was suddenly about me. I had completely rejected the teachings of Christian Science and I was in a drug-induced stupor, but I still heard God speaking directly to me, in my own thinking, so strongly that it sounded like a voice.
This angel message from God began to wake me up. My friends and I didn’t get any alcohol that night, and I immediately sobered up. While I continued down the road of drugs and alcohol for another two years, trying to ignore what I had heard, questions nevertheless started coming to me, like, “How can I act and think so badly if God still loves me?” “What does God’s love mean to me?” “What am I going to do about it?”
Finally, one Sunday morning, I went to Sunday School. I arrived very early and sat in my assigned class all by myself. After only a few minutes, I felt so agitated that I left. But I returned the next Sunday, and this time the teacher of the college-age class invited me to sit with his class even though I was younger than the other students. He had seen me come and go the week before, and he must have known something of what was at work in my thinking because he was quickly able to put me at ease. In fact, I eventually took Christian Science class instruction from him the next summer, which is a two-week course about how to heal in Christian Science.
I discovered that no matter how long I had participated in immoral, self-destructive activities, I could never change the eternal fact that God loved me. God didn’t love the foul actions, nor did He love me in spite of those actions, but He loved me because God simply could not help loving what He saw of Himself.
In the first chapter of Genesis we read that man is made in the image and likeness of God (see verses 26, 27). To me, this meant I was what God saw when He looked at the reflection of Himself, which is only good. What had before appeared to be my actions and my thoughts, when I drank and did drugs, never actually belonged to my true identity.
Through this understanding, all the past wrongs dropped away. What’s more, I felt as if I had never lost anything, not even God’s love or my closeness to God. It was as if all the years of drugs and alcohol, and the absence from Sunday School, never affected me.
For a short time, though, I lost friends. My former friends had no desire to follow me in my new spiritual journey, and I found myself socially isolated and alone.
But as I prayed, I found a passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy that was very helpful. It reads: “Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank? Then the time will come when you will be solitary, left without sympathy; but this seeming vacuum is already filled with divine Love” (p. 266). Right where I didn’t have friends, divine Love had already filled the void. How could it be otherwise? God had already told me that I was loved! How could infinite Love fall short and leave me?
I discovered that true friendship was an expression of God, Love. And God was already giving me new friends, with people who held the same understanding of God that I was learning about. Every Sunday and Wednesday, when I attended Sunday School and church, I was in the presence of friends. My social interactions with these individuals quickly increased, and I soon found myself with what became lifelong friendships.
Looking back, I have come to a couple of conclusions: First, God is always speaking to me and to all. We just need to listen for God’s angel messages. Second, no matter how far we may think we have strayed from God, we haven’t. God never changes. What was true about the love of God yesterday is still true today. No one is ever beyond the loving embrace of God. We are all being constantly guided to a fuller, happier expression of who we are as God’s loved child.
Kenmore, Washington, US
