You can make a difference
Most of us want to help others. But we may feel overwhelmed by the world's problems. We read in this paper and in others of struggling people in Afghanistan, Cambodia, San Salvador, Iran. But what can we do?m Sometimes, it seems, nothing beyond caring.
But we can make a difference. Today. One way is to support organizations that are genuinely helping others. There are many of these that welcome time and money and use them wisely.
But even more, we can pray. There is a loving God who can do more for Afghans and Cambodians than any of us. When tender concern for others awakens in a person the instinct to pray to God rather than fall prey to sad pity, he or she has taken the first step in doing something todaym that will make a difference.
Christ Jesus wept and groaned only briefly at the tomb of his dear friend Lazarus. Quickly he roused himself to his usual composure and confidence in God's power to heal. n1 We can do the same, at least to some degree. We never need wallow in worry.
n1 See John 11:35 -- 44;
Prayer that works in the world must first work in the human heart, in deepest thoughts. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of this paper n2 and in informed and compassionate citizen, writes, "The weapons of bigotry, ignorance, envy, fall before an honest heart." n3 Prayer that makes a differences acknowledges in humility and confidence that all God causes and maintains is good; that He is all-in-all; that each of His children is at one with Him, dearly cared for, abundantly supplied, totally safe; that infinite Love who is God Knows each of them and tenderly holds each in perfection; that no idea conceived by God, Mind, can wander or be forced from Him.
n2 Mrs. Eddy is also the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science;
n3 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m p. 464.
These spiritual facts may seem remote or even foreign to some people, deluged as most of us are with words and pictures of threatening conditions that seem to be so real. But material pictures are real and threatening only to the material senses. They are not so to spiritual sense, and every reader of this paper, as well as every other human being on earth, has sprititual senses that overrule and correct the material senses if we will only let them do it.
Letting spiritual sense replace material error is the beginning of healing prayer. It is like the replacing every student does in school when he gives up mistaken beliefs about geography or history for the facts. The important difference is that in prayer we are replacing apparently correct material facts about current events with spiritual reality -- man as God's likeness, now. This is the highest kind of caring. And all of us are so loved by God that we can today gain at least a grain of this practical truth.
One result of prayer is that a sad sense of the world is lifted. We gain a clearer view of reality, a view made so alive and wise by divine Love that to some modestly increased. degree it uncovers spiritual good right where misery seems to sit.
Another result of prayer is that it does improve world conditions. Our spiritual senses can see it. Wiser, more creative, and courageous political, diplomatic, and individual initiatives appear wher ethey are needed. More temperate action emerges wehre necesimprove in ways that appear miraculous to those who are not yet spiritually awake to God's disposal of events and the power of prayer in the world.
You and I can make a difference today. DAILY BIBLE VERSE Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speat . . . . I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy , and to throw down, to build, and to plant. Jeremiah 1:7. 10