When cycles of ups and downs seem inevitable
Amid global uncertainty in the face of trade wars, an understanding of God’s abundant care can help break through fears that economic chaos is unavoidable.
Concerns about trade wars across the globe don’t appear to have easy answers. When we’re faced with such circumstances, which seem beyond our control, it can be easy to feel anxious or even trapped.
But I’ve been learning there is a way to find needed solutions during troubling times. For decades I have turned to the Bible for healing when faced with sickness and relationship problems as well as economic issues. Whether answers have come quickly or slowly, they have always emerged. As one passage in the Bible says: “God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out, his merciful love couldn’t have dried up. They’re created new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22, 23, Eugene Peterson, “The Message”).
What a strong starting point for breaking the notion that we have to be subject to negative cycles, including cycles of economic slowdown or even derailment!
We can anchor our thoughts in the consistency of God’s presence as divine Love, and when we do, we begin to gain a conviction that wherever and however conflict may be asserting itself, our subjection to cycles of economic supply and demand doesn’t need to be inevitable.
Christian Science, based on and explaining the spiritual teachings of the Bible, continues to reinforce and clarify for me the idea that there is one God whose constant care never runs out. It assures me that God, Spirit, is entirely good and is therefore continuously and lovingly providing us with all that we need. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, wrote in her most important book, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” “… to all mankind and in every hour, divine Love supplies all good” (p. 494).
This divine supply of good that is everywhere present can never favor some and result in harm for others, because it is everlasting and supreme, as God is. This good includes inspiration that meets our needs moment by moment in ways that could never result in a dead-end cycle of doom or loss or leave us with any sense of being condemned.
In my early adulthood I experienced intervals of a few weeks at a time when it felt like a mental shade came down, cutting off the light of inspiration and joy. I would persist in my prayer and study of Christian Science, which brought a conviction that God was always here and always caring. The dark thoughts would vanish for a time in the light of divine Love’s message of good and joy. But a question lingered: “Will these dark periods keep coming and going?”
I continued to pray to see that God’s constant goodness is not subject to ups and downs of material circumstances but is my – and everyone else’s – natural state of being as God’s child. The ever-available supply of God’s abundant goodness, expressed as greater harmony and peace, is always at hand.
These ideas helped me stop harboring hurts and fears, and finally this recurring cycle of “down” periods stopped permanently. I felt so deeply grateful for this illustration of Love’s abundance.
Christian Science emphasizes that Spirit is the one real source of goodness, to which everyone, as a cherished child of God, has equal access. Praying from this spiritual basis can lift and open our thought to recognize the boundless nature of God’s abundance and to both perceive and express the fairness and goodwill that reflect Spirit’s benevolence for all.
In a message to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul captured how such fairness and good find expression wherever supply and demand are concerned, in a generosity that is as applicable today as then. It says: “At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: ‘The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little’ ” (II Corinthians 8:14, 15, New International Version).
We may be a ways from always seeing this bighearted balance of supply and demand in all human affairs. But abiding in and living out from the solid spiritual fact that God’s “merciful love couldn’t have dried up” does make a difference. It does much to help render powerless whatever sense of apprehension or rivalry would keep us from seeing Love’s abundant provision evidenced more and more at home and abroad.