Always meaningfully employed
Newly single. New housemates. No job. Bills accruing. And a borrowed car. That’s how I started out on an urgently needed job search many years ago.
Having grown up in Christian Science, I was familiar with this idea from “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science: “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need” (p. 494). I knew from experience that this was true about divine Love, God. But how was this going to work out in my current situation?
Christian Science, based on the Bible, also teaches that God has created all of us full of joy and gladness; we have an innate joy and desire to do good that come from God. Recognizing our true, spiritual identity as God’s offspring, or expression – and therefore our relation to one another as brothers and sisters – empowers us to do our part in helping meet the world’s need for truth, health, and happiness.
To find a job was certainly my desire. But I had more to learn, on a deeper level. Science and Health states, “Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds” (p. 1).
I was on my way to an interview when I saw a poster in the window of a Christian Science Reading Room that said, “You are already employed.” I ran in. “Please explain that poster!” I hurriedly asked the person working there, who smiled. We had a wonderful discussion that left me understanding more about God, and four main things came to me:
• Our completeness: God supplies everything we need. This includes being employed at every moment in utilizing all the spiritual qualities that God has given us in whatever we are doing each day. In this way we can each be going about our heavenly Father’s business, following Jesus’ example (see Luke 2:49).
• Our purpose: It is already set. God knows, places, and paces us. We can lean on God and let divine goodness be expressed in all we do. Goodness multiplies, so we can start right where we are. In “The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany,” Mrs. Eddy encourages rising “above the oft-repeated inquiry, What am I? to the scientific response: I am able to impart truth, health, and happiness, and this is my rock of salvation and my reason for existing” (p. 165).
• Our future: God exists in the eternal now, and therefore expresses goodness, joy, and purpose in each of us, eternally. With gratitude, we can count on God’s guidance and protection – always.
• Our value: God, Love, created each of us in His image and likeness. All things created by God have value and purpose, and all of God’s ideas – including us – are harmonious. God’s ideas can’t compete with each other, judge each other, or withhold something of value from one another, because we are each a complete, full, and unique expression of Love’s goodness.
I went on to the interview with new confidence that I was already employed and valued, and that we all were united in the same purpose of seeing good. I felt I was going to the interview not in desperation, but with a goal of imparting goodness as best I could and witnessing divine Love in operation. I saw that there was reason for hope both for me and for the interviewer – their needs would be met in finding the right candidate, and even if that wasn’t me, I trusted in God to uplift and inspire in ways that would lead me forward.
It turned out that the interview went very well, I got the job, and I started work the next week!
Recognizing that God has given us all we need in order to know and reflect His goodness lifts the fear that we won’t have what we need. It “mould[s] and exalt[s]” our motives to a higher, nobler goal: to see how divine Love is already working its purpose out for everyone. We can be employed to be a blessing wherever we are. And that’s a job God has for all of us.
