Have a good day

It had been a long day for the businessman. The train service had been chaotic; key office personnel were out ill; things that should have been done had been left undone. This last thought rang a bell. He had read it in the Bible Lesson n1 that very morning. Christ Jesus had rebuked the Pharisees for their attention to outward appearances and their ritualistic detail at the expense of inner righteousness and humanitarian concern. ''Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!'' Jesus had said, ''for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.'' n2

n1 The weekly Bible Lessons are found in the Christian Science Quarterly.

n2 Matthew 23:23.

Our friend realized he hadn't done much in the way of these ''weightier matters'' that day. He had been irritated with the train service, frustrated by work delays, and more concerned with the inconvenience to himself than with compassion for his ill colleagues.

The next day he again studied the Bible Lesson. He had learned in Christian Science that since God, good, is omnipotent Spirit, He could only have created a spiritual universe, inhabited by spiritual man. Everyone's true identity as a child of God is sinless, diseaseless, he reasoned, and the testimony of the five physical senses can be proved erroneous as we understand our spiritual identity.

According to the news, train difficulties persisted that day, but our friend could see that disorder had no place in God's universe. As Genesis assures us, ''God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.'' n3 Holding to this view, he left home at the usual time. At the station there was a large crowd of commuters, but he boarded a train quite quickly and arrived at his office not much later than usual.

n3 Genesis 1:31.

He wondered how his absent colleagues were, and then thought that he could help them best by realizing that each individual is truly the perfect, spiritual offspring of God and cannot be touched by sickness. Later, he telephoned his co-workers to ask how they were getting on. As a result of these calls he was given some information that enabled him to go ahead with an office project in their absence.

Although our friend was still faced with doing the work of three people that day, he remembered judgment, mercy, and faith. He had exercised righteous judgment by mentally replacing what seemed to be disorderly traveling conditions with the truth that because God's creation is finished and very good, His reflection, man, cannot be subjected to chaos any more than a mirror can produce an untidy image of one's well-groomed appearance. He had genuinely felt mercy and compassion for his fellow workers. Now he needed faith.

The office project was important, and he missed the expertise of his two absent colleagues. However, he knew that if he faithfully pressed on, recognizing that he was not a vulnerable mortal but an immortal idea in Mind, God, whatever was necessary would be supplied.

Later that day one of his colleagues had recovered enough to come to the office. Together they were able to finish the project satisfactorily.

Going home that evening he mused on the difference between the two days. Today had not been a long day; he had not been bothered by train difficulties; and, most important, those things that should have been done, had been done. The more productive day reflected his fuller understanding of spiritual reality. As Mary Baker Eddy n4 writes in her definition of ''day'': ''The objects of time and sense disappear in the illumination of spiritual understanding, and Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded.'' n5

n4 Mrs. Eddy is the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.

n5 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 584.

As we dwell mentally in God's realm, the only true realm, the irritations and frustrations that belong to a material sense of things begin to disappear, and their place is taken by poise and dominion. Then we see what is good and necessary opening up in our present experience. DAILY BIBLE VERSE Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Matthew 5:7