Life Without Limits
Bringing a spiritual perspective to daily life
Recently I received a letter from a longtime friend. She wrote that her daily routine amounts to a trip to the supermarket or maybe to a restaurant for dinner. "I don't get around much anymore," she added.
My friend needed help. I love her and wanted to respond to her apparent consent to the general belief that advancing years take their toll. I prayed to know how to respond in a gentle, appropriate way that could bring healing.
I turned to the Bible and the teachings of Christ Jesus. He showed that God was his and our Life when he said, "I am not come of myself, but he that sent me is true" (John 7:28). It was the power of God that enabled Jesus to heal and comfort people and restore them to normal activity. God is the Life of all, and Life is timeless.
Here is the answer to declining energies: know God! Know Him as the only true power. This is obeying the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3). We must understand that God, who is Spirit, made us spiritual, not mortal. Life is spiritual and timeless. To grasp this view of our true being, we must give up the false belief that we are material and limited - that we exist apart from God.
We truly can realize that we are God's spiritual reflection, having timeless being. This spiritual concept of being brings freedom, inspiration, and dominion. It enables us to glimpse the life pattern of our true identity. And, though perhaps at first faintly, we perceive life as continuous - without beginning or ending.
Can you grasp this glorious view of life now? Can you experience something of its promise? You can if you're a thinker! You can if you welcome the challenge of new concepts. You can if you are willing to test a new idea by relating it to a known fact.
Jesus did this when he used analogies from nature to illustrate lessons about God's nature as endless Life. For example, he asked people to consider how lilies and grass grow effortlessly, without concern about next week or next year. And he compared God's kingdom to a minuscule mustard seed that grows into a huge tree (see Matthew 6:28-30 and 13:31, 32). Jesus' words teach us today that vitality and growth are God-given qualities, natural and indestructible, productive, independent of all the limits of time.
We cannot doubt our right to vitality when we realize the deep meaning of Jesus' words. He clearly wanted everyone to experience the eternal life that is of God. Timeless being is for everyone. Jesus proved it. God's all-embracing love ensures it.
From the Bible we learn that the Christ, the true idea of Life, which heals, was the power that enabled Jesus to redeem himself and others from death. He nullified as a lie all the evidence that life ends. And he said that the Christ would be with us on earth always (see John, Chap. 14). Are we ready to receive this message of God, to allow it to reveal the continuity of Life as our very own being?
In "Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered the Science of Christ, Christian Science, says, "Jesus is the human man, and Christ is the divine idea..." (Pg. 473). The living Christ is available to us today. As we understand Christ and embody the Christ-spirit, we find our lives expanding and ourselves growing, spiritually. Cramping, limiting fears of death are less and less impressive. We begin to claim and enjoy the spiritual gifts that are divinely ours: joyous acceptance of good, a buoyant outlook, vigor, freedom, action.
So I wrote back and shared these truths with my friend, assuring her that she is now and always has been God's spiritual creation, forever free of time and limitation. I know that as she realizes some of this, she will lose the fear of feebleness, fear of falling, fear of losing her joy. She will rejoice in her timeless being. Like a plant responding to light, she will feel the Christ and be blessed.
But please continue reading! You, too, are God's expression of timeless being. You, too, can wake each morning to feel a renewal even greater than that which is expressed in the continuity of the seasons, the certainty of the sunrise, the prevalence of beauty. Your true being is eternal, spiritual, timeless!