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As a child, I got a good look at the Milky Way for the first time when our family moved to Oregon. In the dark skies above our ranch, the stars and clusters seemed very close.

I was sitting in a Sunday service in my branch Church of Christ, Scientist, when one of the Readers read an announcement about Sunday School. He said, “We welcome young people to our Sunday School.

A Christian Science practitioner once told me that angel messages come with action; they are not just good thoughts, but involve results. I had been devoting lots of my prayer time to thinking about church.

Imagine standing at the threshold of the fourth century after Christ Jesus’ ascension and watching the shadows gather portending a dark time ahead for humanity, as Christian healing disappeared from the practice of Christianity. What if you knew it would be over a millennium before Christ’s Christianity, with its attendant “signs following,” would begin to reappear? Would you just give up, feeling it was futile and pointless to stand against the currents of such an overwhelming nighttide? Or would you dig deep, and resolve never to abandon the Truth you had witnessed the power of—not only for your own sake, but at least as importantly, for the sake of the many in need you could still help and heal? Your decision would have outsized effect—as a modern-day analogy illustrates.

I once told a spiritually mature friend of mine that I had finished reading the weekly Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly. He replied, “Oh? I am just on the first section!”  It’s tempting to enjoy the spiritual concepts in the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy while reading about them, but then allow them to drift out of thought.

As a young adult , I became fascinated with evil—not with any desire to have it or practice it, but with a strong desire to end it. My effort to find solutions led me on a journey of studying anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

The apostle Paul’s admonition  “Pray without ceasing” ( I Thessalonians 5:17 ) is one of a list of prayer counsels I’ve come to call my prayer checklist. Unceasing prayer can seem impossible with everything else one has to do.

Court trials—real ones or those in movies or on TV—tend to promote the concept that there are many minds, many approaches, many sides, and many laws at odds with one another. There is the defendant, the prosecutor, the judge, the witnesses, and the jury, among others—all with many opinions and often conflicting motives.

At first Moses shrank from the divine demand to free the Israelites from bondage. He asked, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” ( Exodus 3:11 ).

One summer, I was visiting Boston from Canada for the Annual Meeting of The Mother Church. I had been inspired by how the Church wraps its arms around the world, spreading the message of God’s love.