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The infinite Mind we reflect

A Christian Science perspective: We can turn to God, divine Mind, to know just what we need to.

  • By Liz Butterfield Wallingford

The lease on our apartment was concluding in a few months, and my husband and I needed to decide whether to move elsewhere or renew the lease. We loved the apartment and weren’t anxious to leave, but felt impelled to do our due diligence in considering all the possibilities.

However, comparing other options proved difficult: We didn’t know if the rent on our current apartment would change with a new lease, and the company managing the property wasn’t able to provide that information until later than we could reasonably wait to get a sense of what we wanted to do. We could make educated guesses about the numbers, but it still felt as if we were having to make an important decision while lacking a key piece of information. It was a little unnerving.

Throughout my life, I’ve found it quite helpful to turn to God for guidance, and it seemed like the natural thing to do here. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus,” we read in the Bible (Philippians 2:5). I’ve come to understand that the Mind Jesus consistently relied on was not a human mind, but God, the one true, infinite, eternal Mind – which Jesus expressed so completely that it healed through him.

The wonderful thing is that this same Mind, this same God, is here to guide anyone, each of us, because we are actually the spiritual creation of God (see Isaiah 43:7), reflecting this infinite Mind. At every moment, all that is spiritually true is being revealed to us by God – the Mind that created and knows all that is real. “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, explains, “Nothing is new to the infinite Mind” (p. 544). Spiritual ideas may seem new to us when we turn to God in prayer, but they are entirely natural to us as God’s reflection.

So I prayed to discern what I needed to know, to better know what God knows, to yield in my own thought to the Mind that guided Jesus. We learn in the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible that God’s creation is complete and good. Nothing is missing or unknown to Him, which means that we are subject to nothing less than certain intelligence and goodness.

As these ideas filled my thought, I felt a great sense of peace. The fear that a lack of information might hamper my husband’s and my ability to make a productive and right decision simply lifted as I realized that there is no hidden X-factor to God’s goodness. And we saw evidence of that as things unfolded with our housing.

Even without knowing what the rent for a renewed lease would be, we were led forward in the decisionmaking process. As we continued to pray, the idea came clearly to look into buying a home in a certain neighborhood nearby. Then, if it didn’t seem right to move forward with that, we would plan to renew the lease to our apartment. We ended up moving forward with buying the new home, which continues to be a blessing for us several years later.

The spiritual fact that we reflect infinite God, Mind, can have a powerful effect on our everyday lives. When we pray to yield to this Mind, acknowledging God’s full knowledge of all that is good and true – and that He imparts this knowledge to us as His reflection – we find more and more that we know just what we need to know.

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