Articles

You, who have stepped into the wilderness— “loneliness; doubt; darkness”  1 — before your foot moved to start the journey, angels came. Like the angel touched Elijah’s shoulder, as he tried to sleep away his trouble alone under a desert tree, and commanded him, “Rise up and eat,” so you are told, “Rise up, eat.

There was a time when I could not find a good job. I felt I knew exactly what the perfect job would be, but I was unable to get it.

Like the disciples in the Bible, many of us may find it tempting, when discouraged, to go back to old ways of thinking and acting. And if we revert to those familiar ways, we may find we come up empty, as some of Christ Jesus’ disciples did after one long, fruitless night fishing near the end of their three years with him.

As a Christian Science chaplain in the United States Army, I was in the country of Jordan, ministering to soldiers in my unit. Several asked if I would baptize them in the Jordan River, where the Bible says Jesus was baptized.

Life can be challenging. Sometimes we may feel we’d like an army to help us fight our battles.

Many have found the idea that prayer heals to be a fact. Numerous lives transformed and restored to harmony, reversed diagnoses, and remarkable healings—some of which have been verified and recounted in this very magazine—attest to it.

“Abandon all hope , ye who enter here. ” Dante’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy, certainly presents an arresting image of the gates of hell.

Over the years , thousands of verified healings brought about by prayer have been published in The Christian Science Journal, Sentinel, and Herald magazines. Sometimes, those healed will say how it’s as though whatever hardship or illness they faced—and were healed of—“never happened.

That question popped into my head once again. As a teacher coach, I visit many different schools within a week, and I often try to remember the outfit I wore on the previous visit to each school.

Running a little late one morning years ago, I sat down to quickly read the weekly Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly, hoping to glean an inspiring idea to take to work with me. The Lesson included the story of Daniel thrown into a lions’ den for his refusal to stop praying to God.