In harmony with all creatures

While I was closing my yard gate, a wasp stung me. I hadn’t even seen the wasp, but it must have been threatened by me. Its response was to attack me.

I wasn’t particularly alarmed; I’d had wasp stings before. However, soon my hand and lower arm puffed up. I had been praying, my usual response to anything troubling. But it wasn’t until a friend’s comment that I felt freshness and conviction in my prayer. She directed me to think more clearly about how God created His universe. It’s a common assumption that fear and defensive behavior are natural responses among living things – requirements of self-preservation. But while thinking about all this from a spiritual perspective, I saw that nothing in God’s creation is programmed to fear or motivated to act in response to fear. Fear is not natural to God’s creatures, which live together in balance, harmony, and unity, reciprocally blessed. This harmony is characteristic of everything that God has made.

There’s ample biblical evidence to support such facts. First, the initial account of creation in Genesis lists all that God created: light, the sun, moon, and stars, the water and land, the creatures of the sea and of the earth, all the growing things – and man, including male and female. And in each case God affirms the goodness of what He has made. There is no record of beastly cruelty, warring species, or imperative for conflict.

Later in the Bible, in Isaiah, God describes His creation, saying, “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord” (65:25). There is nothing ferocious or harmful.

Likewise, there are Bible stories that show men unharmed by what were assumed to be deadly encounters. Daniel was safe, not eaten, in a lions’ den. Paul shook off a viper, feeling no harm from poison.

My favorite of these accounts is when God had Moses throw down his rod and it became a serpent. Then God told him to take up the serpent by the tail, and when Moses conquered his fear and grabbed the serpent, it became a harmless rod again. Moses must have seen that he couldn’t be harmed because the serpent wasn’t the danger he thought it was. It seems to me that he must also have seen he was safe because God was with him (and with the snake).

Expanding on these ideas, Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, wrote, “All of God’s creatures, moving in the harmony of Science, are harmless, useful, indestructible” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 514).

And so in spite of the wasp sting, my prayer was to know and to stick with the spiritual facts that since I had always been with God, I couldn’t have been harmed. That, in fact, there wasn’t anything in God’s creation made to harm me – or anyone. Nothing in God’s creation was motivated by fear or made to be destructive because of fear. We are all safe and expressing the goodness that is God in unity and harmony.

Within a short time my hand and arm were back to normal size. There had never been any pain or discomfort. This prayerful experience and subsequent healing were important to me, and I was grateful.

I was also grateful that these same biblical facts are applicable to the greater needs of others. God’s creation is not dangerous. Everything that He has made acts to express His harmony.

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