What can I do for you?

`WHAT can I do for you?'' We hear this question frequently. Sometimes it is said with the desire to help a customer in a store or on the telephone. Sometimes it's said without much thought. It's a question that one day gave me cause for reflection when someone came to my door whom I knew only slightly and didn't warm to readily. I had been considering how I could best live the Christianity I had been learning as a student of Christian Science, and this question popped quickly into thought.

``What can I do for you?'' What could I do for her? The first thing that occurred to me was that I could do my best to think of her as God sees her and as I would like to have her see me. So I began to recognize the fact that God had made her as well as me, not as sinful mortals but as His blessed spiritual offspring. I realized that because this is the truth, she had everything going for her that she had inherited spiritually from her creator. With this recognition came, inevitably, a warm rush of understanding and the beginning of a very helpful relationship for us both.

``What can I do for you?'' may have been Christ Jesus' thought as he walked the paths of Galilee and preached to the multitudes. ``I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly,''1 he once said. His primary purpose was to glorify his Father and to bring his intimate knowledge of Him to the earth scene. That he did this with superb success is evident from all the records of his healing ministry.

In the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy2 writes: ``Jesus established in the Christian era the precedent for all Christianity, theology, and healing. Christians are under as direct orders now, as they were then, to be Christlike, to possess the Christ-spirit, to follow the Christ-example, and to heal the sick as well as the sinning.'' And a little further along on the same page she writes, ``Our Master said to every follower: `Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature!...Heal the sick! ...Love thy neighbor as thyself!'''3

The world is holding up its arms for relief from its agonies, from its sicknesses and sins and shortcomings. We can give of our hearts' rich treasure if we will listen in prayer to the thoughts God constantly gives us about His children, His creation. What God is telling us is something far different from what human knowledge and appearances would indicate. And a glimpse of this perfect spiritual reality can open the door to healing.

God's will for man is certainly that of continuous wholeness, freedom, usefulness, and progress. The ability to bear witness to the truth of man as God's fully cared for spiritual image is impelled, upheld, and protected by divine Love itself. Such a view ensures our own progress, and it enables us to help others in a profoundly meaningful way.

1John 10:10. 2The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. 3Science and Health, p. 138.

You can find more articles like this one in the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine. DAILY BIBLE VERSE: Whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth. And hereby we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before him. I John 3:17-19