Our perfect guide to freedom
Sometimes troubles can feel like a thick forest, obstructing our way forward; but turning to God, we find direction toward healing and progress.
Our family recently traveled to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. We love exploring rich, wild terrain in new areas, and we certainly weren’t disappointed with what we found there.
For our first Kauaian hike, we decided to climb a mountain to see a waterfall. On our phones, we have a GPS app that enables us to use satellites to navigate. The distance to the falls is only about three miles, yet because the route is so densely overgrown, it took much of the day for us to reach sight of them. The rainforest is so thick that every ten minutes or so we needed to refer to the GPS to correct our path.
Just 20 yards of progress through this beautiful tangled terrain was hard-earned. Sometimes we had to backtrack or try a new direction. Over and over, we used the guidance coming from our app to ensure we were on the correct route.
When stopped near some monstrous ferns to rest, I thought about how this activity related to the way I’ve sometimes had to approach prayer. When the way forward seems hopelessly entangled, or even blocked altogether, we need something truly dependable to show us the way.
Over many decades, Christian Science has served as a GPS of sorts for my life, pointing the way to spiritual growth and healing. Christian Science, explains Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy, “shows the scientific relation of man to God, disentangles the interlaced ambiguities of being, and sets free the imprisoned thought” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 114).
My family saw proof of this statement after my wife became ill. While the symptoms were dramatic, it was the tangle of thoughts and fears that went along with them that we knew we really needed to address in prayer. But it felt difficult to hold on to even a simple inspiring concept.
Quickly, we realized that we needed guidance – a clear direction forward. “Keep distinctly in thought,” counsels Science and Health, “that man is the offspring of God, not of man; that man is spiritual, not material; that Soul is Spirit, outside of matter, never in it, never giving the body life and sensation” (p. 396).
Christian Science teaches that because we are all children of God, divine Spirit, our true origin is not material. Instead, God’s spiritual goodness flows through us, expressed in every part of what we truly are. We don’t have to pray to become the unrestricted spiritual offspring of God. Rather, prayer helps us recognize that we already have that grand status, and experience the healing that results from grasping something of this.
As my wife and I prayed together, we steadily aligned our thoughts with what God was showing us. At one point, in the middle of the night, I awoke and was inspired by what God revealed to me: that God doesn’t create any of us as little mortal petri dishes, subject to invasion and infection. No, as Jesus put it, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6).
None of us, then, is a mortal being who may or may not have a spiritual healing; we have only our God-given spiritual nature. Our true substance is of God – entirely spiritual, without an atom of matter to it, perfectly whole.
As we strove to keep these powerful facts in thought – and didn’t beat ourselves up when our thoughts went sideways – we loved the truth more and more. Soon my wife was feeling like herself again, and it was nice to see her happy smiles.
Whether we’re in the middle of a continent or in the middle of an ocean, we can depend wholeheartedly on God’s loving inspiration to guide us to healing. As the Bible puts it, “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way” (Psalms 37:23).