Idea Power

Taking a spiritual look at events and issues of special interest to young people.

Maybe you're reading this article. Or maybe you're listening to someone reading it on the radio. In either case, what it has to say to you is locked up in the ideas it will share.

Ideas. What are they, really? You can't see them. You can't touch them. They're conveyed with words, but they aren't words. Ideas are very real, but they have an existence beyond what you can see or hear or even taste, touch, or smell. One thing for sure: without ideas, nothing would happen. Everything constructive anyone has done or made was the result of having had an idea first about doing it or making it.

Christian Science has taught me this. It is an explanation of being, of existence, that comes from what is told in the Bible, and particularly what is shown in the life and words of Christ Jesus. It involves the fact that a God of goodness and love created the universe-not of things you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell, but of ideas. His ideas. Jesus said, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24). If God is Spirit, then God's creation is all spiritual, like Him. That simply means it is not physical or destructible.

Christian Science (which Mary Baker Eddy discovered in 1866) promises that God is totally good. All that God knows and makes-all being-is like Him. Is good. All His ideas are good.

The more a person recognizes the good ideas and qualities of God, the better his or her life gets. There is a connection between what you think and what happens in your life. To understand that you are good, because God made you that way, has a very real effect known as healing. When things are not right for whatever reason, to remember spiritual ideas, think them over, and stick with them (all ways of praying) can turn things all around. Anger can be replaced by kindness, through understanding God's ideas. Worry can give way to confidence when you grasp a clearer view of what His peace is. Sickness can be healed by knowing yourself to be the way God made you. In praying for whatever reason, what comes first is getting the right idea of things, God's idea.

You can begin to seek the right idea of anything-it's always here, because God is always giving it to us. To say it a different way, nothing you see is beyond the range of your ability to improve your concept of it. It helps to keep in thought the spiritual qualities of God expressed around you. Then an ordinary tree can be seen for the spiritual idea of life, shelter, and beauty it in reality is. A person can be seen for the happiness, trust, and vitality he or she includes as a child of God. When you practice finding these qualities and ideas, you see them more readily, and you begin seeing what you didn't see before (although it was there all the time, just as God was there all the time).

Mrs. Eddy's book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures says: "Ideas are tangible and real to immortal consciousness, and they have the advantage of being eternal. Spirit and matter can neither coexist nor cooperate, and one can no more create the other than Truth can create error, or vice versa.

"In proportion as the belief disappears that life and intelligence are in or of matter, the immortal facts of being are seen, and their only idea or intelligence is in God" (p. 279).

Does it still seem hard to understand how to deal with ideas because you can't touch them? Well, here's an analogy that might help: you can't see radar signals, but they're everywhere; the proof is in the fact that they guide ships and aircraft around the globe and in space. That helps show how we're already used to thinking and seeing beyond the five physical senses. It only gives a small hint of the presence and power of God's ideas to reach you.

The invisible things of him

from the creation of the world

are clearly seen,

being understood

by the things that are made,

even his eternal power

and Godhead.

Romans 1:20