Where Freedom Is Found
Everyone eventually discovers that existence isn't what it appears to be. In reality, we are all created by God and have a precious relationship to Him. And because God is Spirit and manifests all, we are each spiritual and exist to express God's goodness. All true existence is in God, secure, satisfied, and free.
Human circumstances often force us to discover where our freedom truly lies. Bitter disappointments, setbacks, and frustrations can actually become inspirational and beneficial when we consciously reach out to God, to good. This reaching out is a mental step and it is vital, because in it we turn away from what is false and material and begin to glimpse that Spirit expresses itself uninterruptedly and harmoniously, in the universe and in each of us. This is the truth that Christ Jesus spoke of as making us free (see John 8:32). God is Truth, the universal cause and power that actually governs us all.
To learn the truth of God brings freedom in daily experience. I know a young man in a correctional facility who started to find true freedom when he began to realize the futility of feeling human will, bitterness, and the urge for retaliation. Twice he had seriously broken the law, and was awaiting trial. At this point, he remembered having attended a Christian Science church service. He sought spiritual help from a Christian Science practitioner, who began visiting him.
Many good qualities surfaced in this man's thoughts and actions as he really tried to see evidence of God, good, right where he was-something the practitioner encouraged him to do. In keeping with the activity of daily prayer, he agreed to watch for every evidence of God in his life, to write down what he saw, and to give thanks for each evidence. These efforts brought correction and reformation to his patterns of thought.
Instead of seeing himself as only confined in jail and separated from freedom, he found opportunities to be friendly with other inmates. He recognized he had the liberty to enjoy roominess in the large and colorful recreation room and library. He composed thoughtful sketches and poems and explained their messages (which had come to him through spiritual inspiration) to the practitioner. He read and shared the Christian Science literature she had brought him. And he began to know God in terms of the synonyms given for Him in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, the textbook of Christian Science: Truth, Life, Love, Spirit, Principle, Soul, and Mind.
He was learning to rely on God, to know and obey His laws. He found that healing was taking place in his thought; he said he no longer wanted to retaliate by taking revenge for wrong that had been done to him. He began to see that anger is self-defeating and to see how it can be destroyed mentally, through replacing wrong thoughts and actions with the spiritual ideas that come from God. He said that he now had a better relationship with his family, and that he no longer thought of suicide as an escape from trouble. He learned that God was his true Life and Mind, and that spiritual freedom and dominion were already within him.
Each of us is free to realize that God is our spiritual origin. This is a revelation and it is rewarding! Christian Science offers complete release from moral weakness, self-condemnation, and physical incapacity. Since God, omnipotent good, does not create evil in any form, God's likeness, man, cannot be less than Godlike. To believe otherwise constitutes self-imposed punishment. As God's image, you are forever sinless and free.
Jesus revealed our spiritual oneness with God. When we understand this unity, binding, limiting, penalizing mortal beliefs begin to fall away. We then know that God is our very Life and being.
To anyone who desires to find true freedom, these words are helpful: "Through Christ, Truth, divine metaphysics points the way, demonstrates heaven here,-the struggle over, and victory on the side of Truth. In the degree that man becomes spiritually minded he becomes Godlike" (Mary Baker Eddy, Message to The Mother Church for 1902, p. 6).
