Skip to footer

A way everyone wins

This article was adapted from the May 10, 2017, Christian Science Daily Lift podcast.

  • By Ali Ziesler

Recently I was playing chess with my young son and he beat me – fair and square. I was happy for him, but at the same time I could feel the pull of a desire to win. It's embarrassing to admit, but with the sting of defeat getting the best of me, I started to wonder if I was good at anything.

But then, what came with that quiet struggle was an overwhelming sense of love that I can only describe as a divine sense of Mother Love – love from God. I realized how grateful I was that my son was flourishing; learning, practicing, and expressing the skills he was taught. It urged me to see that allowing others to flourish reflects well on me, too. That my joy is not solely found in being recognized, but in knowing that the bounty of my own experience requires a fuller expression – a spiritual expression, manifested beyond myself. In these few moments, I felt that I glimpsed God’s love for each of us. As Love's spiritual image, we are each wanted and needed in order to fully express the overflowing largeness of God’s love.

A conscious awareness of what we each are – a God-given, God-blessed spiritual idea – is something Christian Science helps me understand more fully. Everyone we meet up with, family and strangers alike, are important to the world. Just as my son is currently using his divinely-appointed intelligence to be a talented chess player, we each can bring out the fullness of our individual expression of God, in our own unique, creative way – and that naturally includes the ability to cherish ways that others are expressing God, too.

This article was adapted from the May 10, 2017, Christian Science Daily Lift podcast.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Enjoying this content?
Explore the power of gratitude with the Thanksgiving Bible Lesson – free online through December 31, 2024. Available in English, French, German, Spanish, and (new this year) Portuguese.
Read the Thanksgiving Lesson
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to A way everyone wins
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/A-Christian-Science-Perspective/2017/0512/A-way-everyone-wins
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe