There’s a saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” which illustrates the unfortunate tendency in human thought to assume that an entrenched and prescribed way of doing things can be effectively applied to whatever problem we’re facing. The need, of course, is for an honest and humble willingness to look at any given problem and discern what’s actually needed, rather than to assume from the outset what the solution should be. Who we are is seen in what we think and do. No one wants to be the expression of automated conclusions or habits of thought. The great need is to be giving ourselves to a care so deep that we are always ready to hear and be that new answer and response of love.
Doctors are gradually learning that the medical protocol that brought relief to a certain disease for a certain patient may not work for another patient with the same disease. The same is true in the metaphysical treatment of disease. The inspiration that brought breathtaking healing to a situation may burn so brightly in our hearts that we may find ourselves wanting to keep using yesterday’s light to deal with today’s darkness. It doesn’t work. The demand is to be what’s most needed for today, not to be what we’ve become most comfortable with or humanly convinced of.
Conflicts between individuals and nations are too often prolonged because people are consumed with being “right,” and with convincing the other side of that fact, rather than with genuinely asking, “What is most needed right here and now?” Healing through prayer is too often delayed because of a tendency to launch into prayer, frantically affirming all of the things we “know about Truth,” rather than trustingly, earnestly asking divine Love to show us what we need to know of Truth and how we can be the expression of Truth at this moment.
