Plenty more

Recently I was lunching with a friend when I suddenly realized I had touched the leg of our lunch table. ''Oh,'' I lamented to my friend, ''I've snagged my brand-new stocking.'' ''Don't bother about that,'' she said. ''There's plenty more where that came from.''

Plenty more! Those two words have stayed with me ever since.

When the thought of lack comes assailing me - lack of opportunity, of money in the bank, lack of any sort - I always correct it with the idea of ''plenty more.'' And it's such fun to correct lack with plenty.

More than just positive thinking, this is spiritual knowing, a form of prayer. It strengthens me too to understand that I have Biblical authority for such knowing. For example, in Christ Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, these words came from the lips of the father: ''Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.'' n1

n1 Luke 15:31.

Walking through our days, we may find the thought of limits cropping up in a number of subtle ways. Payday comes around and we feel affluent. Yet the day before payday perhaps we feel hopelessly lost in lack.

But with Christian Science, which Mary Baker Eddy discovered and founded, we learn that in a very real sense this coming and going is impossible. The Bible states: ''That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.'' n2 Because God is the one perfect creator, and His creation is eternally complete in every detail, the old past records of scrimpiness and fear are without foundation, and divine Mind requires us to let them go. Be free of that baggage! And stay free. In prayer, keep putting the fact where the fiction seems to be. Realize what's spiritually true.

n2 Ecclesiastes 3:15.

We can't cherish lack and expect to have God's riches come pouring in on us - His riches of understanding, spiritual seeing, intelligent judgment. Talking and thinking lack is like trying to make something of nothing. Nothing is already nothing, without a cause. It is an absence, not a presence. There seems to be just as much darkness as light. But darkness is an absence of something, not a presence of something.

So often we find ourselves working hard to get rid of nothing - something that seems a solid condition but isn't, in God's sight, a reality at all. Mrs. Eddy says: ''We are sometimes led to believe that darkness is as real as light; but Science affirms darkness to be only a mortal sense of the absence of light, at the coming of which darkness loses the appearance of reality. So sin and sorrow, disease and death, are the suppositional absence of Life, God, and flee as phantoms of error before truth and love.'' n3

n3 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 215.

Man can't, in truth, be closed in by a closet of limits and held tight within its bounds. As God's spiritual image he is ever as free as light. And more and more we can wake to this freedom - this fact. We can challenge slavery, slavery to habits, to passed-along family limits, to lack. Mrs. Eddy so inspiringly says , ''Wholly apart from this mortal dream, this illusion and delusion of sense, Christian Science comes to reveal man as God's image, His idea, coexistent with Him - God giving all and man having all that God gives.'' n4

n4 The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 5

What a wonderful way to begin our day, knowing that we already have all we need of good, of strength, and of the power to express them, to let them shine through. DAILY BIBLE VERSE In every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. . . .My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:6, 7, 19