People often say, “I need to pray about a problem I’m dealing with, but I’m not sure what to include in my prayer. How do I know that I’m covering all the bases?”
Prayer, or treatment, in Christian Science is never a formula, and we can trust God to guide our prayer. There are three fundamental concepts, though, that I have found helpful to pray about. Basically these are that cause, substance, and law are spiritual rather than material or physical. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy—the textbook of Christian Science—discusses these extensively.
We can perhaps see the value of including these in our prayers when we look at the questions or suggestions that so often come to thought, in one way or another, when we are confronted with a problem. Among the most common ones are: 1) “Where did this come from?” (having to do with cause); 2) “It’s hard to pray when the material body is sick or hurting” (a false sense of substance); and 3) “How long is this going to continue?” (what law is governing us?).
