Our daughter was at one of her high school color guard team practices. The rest of the family was headed off to another activity. But I had felt led that evening to stay home and pray for church. While this direction seemed a bit puzzling, I was obedient.
As I prayed, I was giving thought to the work we are to be doing as church members. In a message to the church at Ephesus in the book of Revelation, John admonishes this church for leaving their “first love” (see Revelation 2:1–7). Their city was plagued by belief in and application of the so-called powers of magical arts (see Mary Baker Eddy, Message to The Mother Church for 1900, p. 12). The Ephesian church had left their first love—their trust in and loyalty and obedience to God, and their consequent commitment to proving their faith through healing—and so their “works” were grounded in mystery instead of in rightly directed reason. Mary Baker Eddy refers to this kind of reasoning in her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Reason, rightly directed, serves to correct the errors of corporeal sense; but sin, sickness, and death will seem real (even as the experiences of the sleeping dream seem real) until the Science of man’s eternal harmony breaks their illusion with the unbroken reality of scientific being” (p. 494).
I considered Jesus’ example, how healing was always at the center of his activity.
