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“I feel like a little part of my soul is dying inside every day I go to this job,” I sobbed to my husband one night. That may sound like melodrama, but at the time, my despair felt overwhelmingly real.

The other night I had a terrible dream. It was one of those dreams that seem so real it’s hard to distinguish it from reality.

A number of years ago my wife and I joined two other couples one Saturday to go to Los Angeles for a lecture and lunch. Like most friends we talked and laughed— thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.

There I was in my chair, reading the Christian Science Bible Lesson for that week, when I caught myself saying, “A ziggurat? What does this Bible story have to do with anything I’m dealing with?” Prior to this particular day, I had found myself sometimes just reading the Lesson—but not praying it and really living it. Yet, as this week started, I promised myself I would not move past a section of the Lesson until I could glimpse some new concept from what I was reading that would help and heal, and bring me to a deeper, more spiritual level of thinking.

I have always appreciated and respected Mary Baker Eddy, but over the years I heard some things about her that disturbed me. For instance, her extraordinary attention to detail and high standard in the governance of her home made her seem to me overly picky.

I grew up in a Christian Science family, where my brother and sister and I learned that God was “a very present help in trouble” ( Psalms 46:1 ), and that the teachings of Christ Jesus show us the meaning of God and how He loves us. We studied the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and everything I learned from her also guided me deep into the Bible, where again, I learned that I was loved as a child of God.

I was seated at an interfaith dinner next to someone I didn’t know, who asked me to explain my religion, Christian Science, to her. She said she was unfamiliar with it and wanted to understand some of its basic ideas.

The common worldview holds that there are several causes or influences driving our experience—that at any time some impelling force can manifest itself to our detriment. We can wake up one morning and be led to think a hereditary disease has decided to make an appearance.

The jury’s verdict is, Not guilty. “Then the prisoner rose up regenerated, strong, free.

Jesus promised his followers, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life” ( John 10:27, 28 ). This “eternal life” is the salvation all Christians hope will be the culmination of a life well lived, but such a hope raises the question: Are we good enough for eternal life?  In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke we read the story of the man who asked Jesus, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?” ( Matthew 19:16 ).