Even you
The Bible speaks directly to people yearning for peace, health, harmony -- pure comfort. One way it talks to us is through true stories about men and women who found deep consolation and healing by turning to God.
Take Joseph, for example. n1 He was an intelligent young man with a bright future, loved by his powerful father. But his jealous half brothers seemed to block him from fulfilling his great promise. They sold him into slavery.
n1 See Genesis 37-45
Yet God was always with him, and in due course, while still in slavery, he was given a position in which he was able to help many thousands of people, including his own brothers and family.
Some readers of this article may say, "I know that story, and it is beautiful. Yet I can't identify with Joseph. He's too pure. I've made many mistakes and done wrong things. But I long to feel God's comforting presence. Can it ever happen to me?"
By all means it can. Even to you.
Though the Bible does tell many inspiring stories of pure people, it also tells another kind of story -- of the successes that come to sometimes less-than-pure people who reform and turn to God. In fact, every inspired word of the Bible can be seen in terms of teaching the comfort and blessings that come to anyone who turns from evil ways and false beliefs about himself as a mere mortal to glimpse the truth of man as God's beloved child. This truth is the Christ-idea. It shines like a lantern through the whole Bible, and most brightly in the character and career of Christ Jesus.
The story of Joseph's father Jacob is a case in point. n2 As a young man, Jacob deceived his father to obtain the blessing and inheritance that would have gone to his brother. Because of this, he had to flee from his home. Yet even in exile he learned more of God's closeness. He learned that he had a divine mission to fulfill, and eventually Jacob came to terms with his shortcomings. Wrestling one night with a false sense of himself, he glimpsed his true spiritual nature. This light of spiritual truth, so glorious and penetrating, was what he really had wanted all along, and he refused to let it go. The struggle and triumph changed his nature and enabled him to fulfill his promise.
n2 See Genesis 27-33
Whether we identify more with Jacob's early duplicity and inner longing or with Joseph's purity, the tender comfort of God is here for us. Our basic need is to admit our wrongs and then, even more meekly, admit our native perfection as children of God, ideas of divine Mind. Even though the material senses may rail against this holy truth, the spiritual senses receive it, and we are comforted and assured by it as by nothing else. For the true Comforter of all mankind is not a person, a thing, or a place. It is the Christ, Truth, and it is wholly revealed through the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m the textbooks of Christian Science.
These textbooks tell every person on earth that man is so dear to God, so at one with good, that there is in reality no loneliness, no poverty, no disease, no fear.To the degree that we accept this idea, our lives are changed. We are supported and comforted. The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, writes, "Father, we thank Thee that Thy light and Thy love reach earth, open the prison to them that are bound, console the innocent, and throw wide the gates of heaven." n3
n3 Miscellaneous Writings,m p. 275.
Everyone can accept God's love and be comforted. Including you. DAILY BIBLE VERSE If God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you? Matthew 6:30