There's the old saying "Don't cry over spilled milk." And there's the old nursery rhyme about the egg that fell off the wall and broke, and
All the king's horses,
And all the king's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
The point is, how do we handle seemingly irretrievable losses in our human experience?
If our lives seem to have been punctuated by past failures, and our present circumstance seems frustrating, we may be in danger of expecting disappointment and losing our faith in good. Faith in good and expectancy of its appearing are essential to well-being and progress.
This faith in good is really natural to us because our true origin and the governing authority in our life is divine Love. God, good, is our actual creator. He is the divine Principle governing the universe with uninterrupted, eternal, and infinite laws of ever-available good.
Irrespective of figurative broken eggs and spilled milk in our experience, there is a redeeming divine law of compensation in the omnipresence of God's goodness. The influence of past failures can be short-circuited by the immediate application of the law of good to this present moment. In fact, such a cutoff from past failure is a divine demand. Divine Love never fails, and in our real being as spiritual man, neither do we, nor have we ever.
Wordsworth wrote, "The Child is father of the Man." Indeed, human birth, childhood, and incidents in our past do seem to cast a strong influence, haunting and even charting our present experience and promise. But thought-patterns and expectancies fashioned by past mistakes and disappointments cannot hold our hopes captive if we really understand something of the divine nature of life as the reflection of infinite Mind.
God, the one Mind, is really the Father and the Mother of man. Individual man is not a mortal. He is a conscious spiritual identity, God's image, expressing God's intelligence and love.
The divine Mind is ever present. And because all true life exists in Mind, and is therefore good, errors never did occur in divine reality. Spiritual good alone constitutes what appears to be our past, present, and future.
Time is not an element of infinitude; it is not a fixed measurement. Time is a fleeting, floating mental impression; relative, not absolute. Chronology is not the pattern of spiritual progress. There is no chronology as such in Mind. Mind's life pattern is the ever-unfolding of perfect spiritual ideas, independent of time. Eternity is not a long time. Eternity is a forever timeless, limitless NOW. In reality, now is all that ever exists.
The limited human sense of things sees its own beliefs. Our present experience is a picture of what we believe to be true, right now. It's an objectification of the concepts we accept to be true and the qualities we entertain, right now. In a very fundamental sense, then, yesterday and tomorrow have nothing to do with fashioning the quality of the moment. This doesn't mean, of course, that day-by-day Christianization and spiritualization of our thinking are irrelevant to our well-being. They're indispensable, not only to the enrichment of the present moment but to the working out of our own salvation.
Because what fashions the quality of any given moment is our belief of what is true at that moment, our constant consideration should be "What am I believing to be true at this moment? How am I expressing true Christliness right now? Are my thoughts and actions being motivated by God, divine Love, in all I do and say?" Human experience is a series of "nows," each now reflecting the convictions of the moment.
What seems to human belief to be the past is a present belief going on now. Our present thought of the past can be corrected right now, and if this includes sin it can be repented of and healed, beginning right now, because it was never part of the divine Mind or of Mind's reflection, man.
If we believe that the past has determined our present, we are mistaken. It isn't the past but our present belief of the past that influences our present condition. And we can always change our present belief through gaining a better understanding of God and man. Our real selfhood, spiritual man, has never been separated from God and has never been involved in error. Our true identity has always coexisted with God. This understanding of truth can correct and expunge sadness or sins of the past. Past mistakes are not chapters in our biographies but dreams to be discounted and outgrown, dissolved in our growing Christliness so that not even a latent impression remains.
Mrs. Eddy writes: "It is well to know, dear reader, that our material, mortal history is but the record of dreams, not of man's real existence, and the dream has no place in the Science of being. It is 'as a tale that is told,' and 'as the shadow when it declineth.'" Retrospection and Introspection, p. 21. And further on she states, "The human history needs to be revised, and the material record expunged." Ibid., p. 22.
Clearly we cannot progress by walking backward, looking only where we believe we have been. Neither can we cling to regrets. We must purify our present thoughts. The presence of divine Love at this moment can fulfill this very moment so richly that past losses are completely compensated.
We can strip bad memories and regrets of their authority and place the quality of this moment—each moment, every moment—under the command of the Christ, the divine influence of ever-present Love. We can realize the immediacy of goodness available in Mind, ever ready to be reflected in our experience.
Divine Principle requires us to express the qualities of ever-present good as uninterruptedly as we can manage, moment by moment. If we are tempted to fear, we can at that moment decide to trust God. If we are tempted to hate, we can instantly decide to love. Tempted to grieve, we can sing psalms instead. The presence of Mind is a fountain of happiness, health, benignancy, and love. We can love and rejoice in life at any given moment.
Real existence is always perfect. The quality of spiritual existence is uninterruptedly harmonious, beautiful, and good. The pure goodness of real existence is a reflection of the absolute and exclusive goodness of infinite Love.
But the quality of material life fluctuates from good to bad and back again because it includes the belief of evil as an element equal with good. We must abandon systematically the belief that evil and matter were ever real. Through regeneration we can relinquish the worn-out thought-fixtures of past evil and refurnish our present experience with beautiful images of Soul.
The Bible says: "I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him. That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past." Eccl. 3:14, 15. The nowness of life requires us to correct our memories and polish our expectancies.
In Christian Science we do not waste time trying to glue unreal dreams back together or to bring back lost circumstances. We do not endeavor to retrieve the past but to purify our present consciousness. We are radically changing our definition of life and man from the human basis to the divinely spiritual basis. We are transforming our sense of what—and when—life is. Living that flows from our understanding of God, good, makes each moment a reflection of God. Being governed by the presence of our divine origin evaporates the influence of the past and nullifies fear of the future and the future of fear.
Our Leader, Mrs. Eddy, writes, "Tireless Being, patient of man's procrastination, affords him fresh opportunities every hour . . . ." Christian Healing, p. 19.
Think what this process—the present correction of past belief—can do for us! Those suffering from a belief in a disadvantaged past can escape from a disgruntled present and an unpromising future! All of us can exchange mortal beliefs for spiritual facts. All of us can put off the false sense of being a mortal and discern that we are immortal man including all right ideas, talents, faculties, and the opportunities to express them.
Scars, handicaps, birth defects, parental mistakes, adolescent missteps, abandoned serious sins, even the present pangs left from past little faux pas; the deep bruises of unjust treatment, the hurts and hates of lost loves—these are all, all dreams; dreams to be expunged and forgotten!
Divine thoughts do not drop out of Principle, break, and fall apart. And the pure nourishment of divine Mother Love does not spill into oblivion. There is a law of good governing all true life, and individual man is not a Humpty Dumpty balanced precariously on an unstable hope. Hope is safe when founded on and grounded in divine Science.
Love's law of compensation is always here-and-now alive and active. Let us rinse out our memories today in the currents of divine Love and look forward to an experience where mistakes will be healed—rendered ineffective—and where the good will always be seen as the real.
