Life's moves
Bringing a spiritual perspective to daily life
One of those movies I enjoy seeing repeatedly is "Searching for Bobby Fisher." Focusing on a young chess prodigy, it's a story of intelligence, innocence, humility, triumph, and love - just what you might expect to find where an unfathomable game that involves castles, knights, bishops, pawns, queens, and kings is concerned.
Sometimes today's world seems a lot like a chess game. Billions of people around the globe are ceaselessly interacting - moving here, moving there - and often not without struggle, competition, and dissension. Sometimes it feels like a game of strategy and survival, retreat and advance, human error and bad luck.
But the Bible assures us that there is God. Or, you could say, a good, underlying Principle that, when understood, regulates our interrelated lives. A supreme intelligence that, when acknowledged, promotes harmony and provides good direction. A power that prevents conflicts.
The Psalms sing of God's reliability and power: "Blessed are all they that put their trust in him" (2:12); "the Lord sustained me" (3:5). They indicate that God certainly is good, and good only: "For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee" (5:4).
God is powerful enough to reveal the answer to every problem we're now thinking about - whether it be sickness, unemployment, loneliness, danger, discontentment. And God is intelligent enough to plan perfectly, guiding all our moves. Providing good things. For all of us. The founder of Christianity conveyed the essence of God's power when he said: "Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him" (Matt. 6:8).
Just who is this good, omniscient God - the divine Designer, as it were - that can actually help us and sustain us?
A quick look at the online Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary says God is "the supreme or ultimate reality." Two sub-definitions are given. The first is "the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe." The second is the definition of God in Christian Science: "the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit: infinite Mind."
Principle, Spirit, Mind - these are three names for God that the Monitor's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, used to help convey the nature of God. Four others are: Soul, Truth, Love, and Life. These seven synonyms for "the supreme or ultimate reality" emerged out of an intensive study of the Bible. And Mrs. Eddy used these terms to write about God in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." For example, this statement on page 427 is talking about God: "Immortal Mind, governing all, must be acknowledged as supreme in the physical realm, so-called, as well as in the spiritual."
Seeing God in terms of these synonyms has helped me in looking for work. Instead of just hoping to get a particular position, I have sought the power of the one intelligent Mind to be in charge of me; to see the plan of divine Principle become evident in my life; to remember that the divine Spirit may have something good in store for me that I don't yet know. And this has brought me peace of mind. As a Bible verse says, "God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof" (Job 28:23). I like to add: "for everybody, at all times, and under all circumstances."
We are all the children of God, made in Her/His "image," as the Bible says. We are the inherently spiritual children of Spirit, the loved children of Love. When we know this, it has the effect of pulling the rug out from under the feeling of competition, rivalry, or conflict. Of silencing our confusion, uncertainty, resentment, envy, fear, and despair. Of protecting us against mishap, accident, and danger. God's design for us is good.
Let us open our affections
to the Principle that moves
all in harmony, - from the
falling of a sparrow to
the rolling of a world.
Mary Baker Eddy
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society