As I pulled up in front of the building, I prepared myself for a busy day. As a volunteer Christian Science chaplain at a state mental hospital, I knew this—like so many before—would be a challenging but rewarding visit.
Over the preceding months I had established a regular route through the hospital, greeting psychiatrists and medical doctors on my way to meet with patients who were interested in talking to me. Sometimes they just wanted a copy of The Christian Science Monitor, or an issue of the Christian Science Sentinel or The Christian Science Journal. Others wanted to pray together, eager to uplift the veil of mental illness, with which they’d been diagnosed.
During this priceless experience I learned—even through the fog of the aggressive suggestions of incapacity, the inability to think, reason, or act logically or in conformity with what we consider “normal” behavior—to see that the true “base line” of sanity is the evidence of God’s love and intelligence at work.
