Turning to God

YEARS ago I had an experience that reminded me of the effectiveness of humbly turning to God for help.I had awakened after spending a restless night struggling with an earache. I prayed but I felt alone and unable to feel God's presence, although I believed Him to be ever present. Because I had been healed through prayer many times before, I continued to pray. I began to realize, however, that my prayers up to this point had been mere wishes. I had been wishing the pain would subside so that I could go about my usual activities. I saw I needed to do more. I began to see myself more fully as the child of God, to understand what more I could do to express God's will and goodness. God made man in His image and likeness--spiritual and free. Understanding that we are governed by this law of God, good, frees us from sin, sickness, and pain. With this recognition, I turned wholeheartedly to God in prayer and was soon well. I had stopped telling God what to do to me and perceived, through prayer, that God's work is already done. This completeness of God's creation sometimes seems difficult to grasp in the face of the many problems in today's world. Yet the fact remains that man made in God's image--our genuine spiritual identity--is complete. As we begin to understand man's God-given completeness more fully, we find that our views of reality are en-larged. We are able to lay off our material views of a material universe for the immortal reality of God's creation. The Way-shower, Christ Jesus, showed us how to look beyond the false facade of matter to man's actual oneness with God. This spiritual view of reality enabled Jesus to heal those who sought his help. It was Jesus' spiritual understanding of how God made His child, man, and his ability to understand man's oneness with God that enabled him to meet humanity's needs for healing and regeneration. Man's completeness is based on divine Principle, God. It's God's law of goodness that man reflects. And divine Principle, God, requires our obedience to this spiritual law. Jesus proved the power of this divine Principle when he healed. As the Bible records in Matthew, "The multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see. Jesus' healing power was evidence of his spiritual understanding of man's unity with God. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "Simply asking that we may love God will never make us love Him; but the longing to be better and holier, expressed in daily watchfulness and in striving to assimilate more of the divine character, will mould and fashion us anew, until we awake in His likeness. Our efforts to see and understand our spiritual unity with our Father-Mother God will be answered as we cease telling God what to do and begin "striving to assimilate more of the divine character. Prayer enables us to seek God and to find Him. It opens the way for a clearer comprehension of God and of man's relationship to Him. And when we are actively striving to express our Godlikeness, we begin to replace fear with love, coldness with charity, strain and stress with divine orderliness. Thus we place our life in obedience to God's law of perfect completeness--with everything in its right place, functioning properly. Such striving teaches us more of God, His ways, and how to follow Him. And it makes it natural for us to turn wholeheartedly to God for help in times of need. As we consistently turn to God, His love will "fashion us anew.