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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.

While reading the allegory of the Greek philosopher Plato, born about 400 years before the Christian Era, I was able to draw parallels between it and what Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, discovered about God and spiritual man in His image. In the allegory, found in his influential work The Republic, Plato imagines some prisoners in a cave, who have lived there all their lives.

I was teaching a kindergarten class. The school had recently been reorganized, with some children suddenly finding themselves in new rooms with new classmates and new teachers.

I am the librarian of a Christian Science Reading Room in a busy downtown area of a city in central California. Assisting visitors in their search for spiritual insights and guidance has been rewarding.

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.

In 2015, I received a letter from The Mother Church inviting me to Boston that June for training sessions for Communications Coordinators around the world. The first thing I did was renew my passport.

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.

I had just finished reading the story of Moses’ encounters with God in Exodus. The Bible records that “the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” ( Exodus 33:11 ).

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 ).

A fellow church member said to me, “Our church is just a shadow of what it used to be. ” I reflected on that for a moment.