When I was a boy on our dairy farm, I felt the Christ touching my thought in a very clear way. My dad would send me out to the pasture to gather the cows for the evening milking, and I recall that in winter, especially on Christmas Eve, I would stop and listen to the cows patiently chomping mouthfuls of hay. In the near distance stood our farmhouse, with its lights ablaze and my mom singing as she readied for Christmas. Above me stretched a starry sky. There was a deep stillness. The thought of the Christ, the divine message from God, having so clearly resulted in the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, filled my heart with awe.
At that time, in the Christian Science Sunday School, I was learning that I could hear this Christ message speaking to me in the uplifting thoughts of joy, helpfulness, and unselfishness that would often come to me. And I was learning to understand the reason underlying the Christ’s presence and voice in my life. In Sunday School and through daily study of the Lesson-Sermon found in the Christian Science Quarterly, I was learning that God created man in His own image, and that this man, including me, is spiritual and perfect—“the apple of his eye,” as Deuteronomy 32:10 so aptly says.
My divine Parent was always at work teaching and showing me the intelligence and unparalleled love of God present with me and in my life. This communication from the Christ goes on in the consciousness of all of us and is often wonderfully apparent in young children. We call receptivity to the Christ “childlikeness,” but it is really our natural openness to the Christ-love from God speaking to each one of us and showing up in wonderful childlike qualities such as goodness, innocence, guilelessness, trust, gentleness, and so forth.
