Choosing the Right Route to Adventure!
DO you ever feel like you're stuck at a fork in the road--needing to choose between fun and adventure and doing what you know is really the right thing? As tough as it is sometimes to say ``no'' to strong temptation, the choice to be and do good is really the more ``adventurous'' way to go. Instead of promising thrills that come and go, sometimes satisfying and at other times frustrating, the adventure of living a good life keeps calling on us to find fresh courage, strength, and ingenuity. As we express more and more of these God-given qualities, we discover the inexhaustible joy of man's spirituality.
It can often seem very inviting to take an immoral route to excitement. Yet, in truth, it's only by not choosing immorality that we leave ourselves free to experience the genuine goodness of God's love in our day-to-day lives. Immorality promises satisfaction, but instead it steals away our recognition of God's great love for us as His children. It would rob us of what is really satisfying!
I discovered this when friends I liked to be with were taking drugs. I too thought it would be an exciting thing to do. But I'd had some wonderful experiences of good when prayer had helped me glimpse something of God's reality and my relationship to Him. I soon realized that when I took the drugs, those experiences, and the real sense of growing spiritually that I'd had as a result, were missing. I quickly learned that I couldn't experience spirituality while seeking immoral pleasure.
And you know what? Compared to the wonderful satisfaction of knowing God and experiencing His love for me, drugs weren't much fun. So I gave up taking drugs for good. I didn't lose out on having friends either.
It might seem hard to stand up to the pressure to do things that we feel aren't right. Yet we're not on our own when we do this. The Bible tells us that Christ Jesus never strayed from God's demand to be and do good, even though--as the book of Hebrews tells us--he ``was in all points tempted like as we are'' (4:15). So Jesus has shown us that it is possible to resist temptation through prayer. Like him, we can be sure of God's great goodness, and of man's true nature as God's image and likeness. This means that God is always with us and gives us His divine authority when we say ``no'' to wrong impulses.
Mary Baker Eddy, who founded this newspaper, studied the Bible until she understood how to heal as Jesus and his earliest followers had. While anyone can learn to heal in this way, to do so we have to make choices in favor of right thinking and acting at all times.
That might seem to be a sacrifice when it looks as if we can't join in and do something that our friends are doing. Yet there will certainly be many other activities with our friends that we can do. And being willing to obey the Bible and learn to heal and help others enables us to take part in something that brings us permanent happiness. It's what Mrs. Eddy describes in her book The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany as ``Love's divine adventure to be All-in-all.'' She says: ``We live in an age of Love's divine adventure to be All-in-all'' (p. 158).
And when you put it that way, that's pretty thrilling! So no matter what anyone tells me, no matter what others get up to, I'm going to choose to experience Love's divine adventure. It gives us a truly adventurous life. That's a choice worth making!
