Going home to God

Have you had it with life? Has life given you nothing but hard knocks from the time you were born? Or, in spite of all your worldly success, is there an aching void in your heart that nothing seems to satisfy? Then perhaps it's time to go home - to God.

The belief that we can live a meaningful life without a conscious sense of God's presence is a tragic delusion. Hard as we may try, such an effort is doomed to failure. Why? Because however little we may now feel we understand and experience God as a living reality, He is our real Life. He is our Soul, our Mind - our reason for existence. Without Him, there would be no consciousness, no identity, no purpose.

Mortal life is a sense of alienation from God - a dream that suggests intelligence has broken away from God to establish a finite universe of matter. This matter/mind universe, from a quark to a galaxy, is a counterfeit of something infinitely more grand and wonderful - the limitless universe of Spirit.

This is why material life can't possibly satisfy us. A counterfeit has no intrinsic value. Even its supposed value is borrowed from the real. All the goodness and beauty in our lives is derived from a higher source than matter. Yet our material senses would trick us into thinking that value is in the material things we see around us. But the real substance of all good is spiritual; good comes from Spirit, God, and must be sought in Him.

This is what the prodigal son in Christ Jesus' parable had to learn. The parable tells of a man who had two sons. The younger asked for his inheritance, ''gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.'' n1

n1 Luke 15:13.

Among this parable's many lessons, might we not see an illustration of the belief that man can break away from God and exist on his own? Christian Science explains that God and man are actually inseparable as cause and effect, as the divine Mind and its spiritual idea, or offspring. It is only a false, counterfeit consciousness that seems to have a life apart from God.

So what happens to the belief that says man can leave God, taking a portion of God's goodness with him? This limited sense of good quickly depletes itself, exposing the poverty of mortal existence: ''When he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.'' n2

n2 Luke 15:14.

Starvation for the things of Spirit eventually hits us all. It's a spiritual hunger that nothing but God can satisfy. It's time to go home - humble, repentant, willing to be a servant of God. We may now feel devastated, alone, and at the end of our rope, but the moment we begin to look outside ourselves and seek God, the journey home has begun.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, writes: ''Who that has felt the loss of human peace has not gained stronger desires for spiritual joy? The aspiration after heavenly good comes even before we discover what belongs to wisdom and Love.'' n3

n3 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 265.

As we seek God in prayer, He answers. The Bible is our guide to Him. And great comfort and spiritual enlightenment can be found in the book the previous quote comes from, Science and Health with Key to the Scripturesm . The most wonderful thing about going home to God is that, by the very fact of His ever-presence, we feel Him come to meet us.m ''But when (the prodigal) was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.'' n4

n4 Luke 15:20.

When we go home to God, divine Love, we feel welcomed as a beloved son. We sense that for all our ''riotous living'' and time spent in pigsties of matter, God has never stopped loving us. Only to mortal sense did we ever leave Him. And we discover He has infinite treasures to bestow on us.

Best of all, we can begin going home today. Our Father is waiting. DAILY BIBLE VERSE To us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him. I Corinthians 8:6