As first-time expecting parents years ago, my wife and I were excited. How often I thought about this line from the Bible on a poster that found its way into our home at that time: “Children are a gift from the Lord” (Psalms 127:3, New Living Translation).
In order for me to be allowed inside the delivery room when the time came, the hospital required that my wife and I participate in “Lamaze” classes throughout the pregnancy. During the third class, our instructor began to set out a series of posters showing the progress of pregnancy. It brought into sharp relief a question I had been thinking about—was man a material organism with birth and death as naturally occurring and celebrated stages of existence, or was man the pure spiritual reflection of God, never born and never dying? I knew from my study of Christian Science that our true identity is spiritual, not material.
Suddenly I found myself feeling extremely ill. The discomfort was intense, and at first I felt I must leave the classroom, but I knew that wandering the hallway wasn’t going to bring relief. Immediately my focus shifted, and I began to mentally tune in to two things I knew by heart: the ninety-first Psalm from the Bible, and “the scientific statement of being” in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy (see p. 468). The ninety-first Psalm has this sweet phrase within it: “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust” (verses 3, 4). And “the scientific statement of being” has this to say, in part: “Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual.”
