The cycle we can depend on

If we find ourselves grappling with repetitive uncertainty, conflict, discomfort, or pain, can we reasonably expect to find permanent freedom? Even the best human efforts can’t loose us from persistent challenges and bring us security. And adding fear, anger, helplessness, or personal ego to the mix certainly doesn’t help.

But looking to God as the divine Principle of harmonious life, there’s a present cycle of unfolding good we can find that breaks us free from cycles of evil. Like the psalmist, we can say, “In my distress I called upon the Lord. ... He delivered me from my strong enemy. ... Who is God save the Lord? or who is a rock save our God? It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way perfect” (Psalms 18:6, 17, 31, 32). Through our Rock of salvation, we can find strength, direction, energy, inspiration, and deliverance from evil.

The discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote, “The cycle of good obliterates the epicycle of evil” (“The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany,” p. 270). She understood God, the divine Principle of good, to hold His creation in an eternal round of unfolding harmony. She explained, “All reality is in God and His creation, harmonious and eternal. That which He creates is good, and He makes all that is made. Therefore the only reality of sin, sickness, or death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to human, erring belief, until God strips off their disguise. They are not true, because they are not of God” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 472).

This doesn’t mean one should simply ignore evil. But we can expect to resolve any evil through a better understanding of divine Principle as the infinite All, and consequently the unopposable force of life. As Christ Jesus showed, there is no reality, substance, or power in any cycle or force that opposes God, the divine all-good. We as God’s likeness are the spiritual expression of this divine Principle.

Prayer doesn’t bring us into the cycle of good but awakens us to it, revealing God’s goodness to be our present and demonstrable reality. This awareness obliterates any claim of evil in the same way that turning on a light extinguishes darkness. There is no battle there. The existence and presence of light effortlessly renders darkness an impossibility.

As we understand God to be the source of spiritual light, and know that we reflect this light, the work of healing becomes effortless. Nothing can ever come between us and the divine Principle of good, because God says of us, “I have given My law in their inward part, and I write it on their heart, and I have been their God, and they are My people” (Jeremiah 31:33, Literal Standard Version).

Cycles of evil in any form are not the unstoppable reality they may appear to be. When my dad returned from his military service, he was caught in a cycle of depression and an economic slump that left him unable to support his family. Then my mom learned of Christian Science, and, as she put it, “I found God to be my Rock.”

Leaning on the divine Principle of health and wholeness in prayer, she understood better that stability in life rests on God’s unchangeable goodness and love for His creation. She could find no basis in God’s love for Dad to suffer from fear, limitation, trauma, or disease. Her prayers resulted in Dad’s permanent healing from depressive cycles and also led to his finding a professional path that satisfied the family’s needs for more than seven decades.

Later as Mom approached menopause, she had a hemorrhage. But she told me that she had too much confidence in God’s ability to heal to put up with that for long. She understood the cycle of good to be the only cycle in control of her health. Her menstrual cycle and all issues related to perimenopause, including that hemorrhage, stopped in one night and never returned.

We can bring healing to cyclical conflict, trauma, economic instability, and disease by finding God to be divine intelligence, or Principle, in which “we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Step by step we can prove that God’s control of the universe obliterates evil cycles and reveals the dominion, security, and health natural to each of us as the children of God.