Does God have a plan for me?
As we prayerfully recognize the spiritual truth of our being as God’s children, our experience adjusts harmoniously.
Maybe you have thought something like this before: “God has a plan for me – the right school, job, house, or spouse.” But if we’re thinking more of God aligning with our desires and less of aligning our thoughts with God’s will, this confuses and limits our understanding of God.
Recently, I was thinking about the story of Moses trying to figure out how to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt to the Promised Land. Moses isn’t convinced the people will follow him, but he believes they would follow God – the one true God. So Moses asks God what he should say to the people to prove that God is indeed the true God, the God of their fathers. “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14).
It’s kind of an unusual name, but it includes the profound acknowledgment that we cannot define the infinite within the finite. Moses’ discernment of God as the great I AM keeps the Exodus to freedom on a spiritual foundation.
Moses is helping his people, and generations to come, understand that God, divine Spirit, cannot be circumscribed. He is not a finite, personal God overseeing a human situation, but divine Principle, Love, revealing the harmony, abundance, and order that exist as divine law.
Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, writes, “A personal God is based on finite premises, where thought begins wrongly to apprehend the infinite, even the quality or the quantity of eternal good” (“The People’s Idea of God,” p. 3).
This finite premise of a personal God is really just an outgrowth of the limitations of trying to understand God – Spirit – and good within the confines of matter. Sometimes that finite premise takes the form of the belief that God has a personal plan for, or hand in, our temporal affairs – such as in finding what we would outline as the perfect house or spouse.
We can feel comforted and supported by the fact that God is our Father-Mother, taking perfect care of us. And we can grow in our spiritual understanding to see that, instead of requests for more good to happen in our lives, our prayers should be a sincere desire for more receptivity to the omnipotence of good and its forever-presence in our lives. Prayer can’t bring God closer to us, because we are forever one with God, but it brings our thought into alignment with established spiritual facts.
I’ve found it helpful to think of it like this: In Christian Science, physical healing isn’t about fixing an ill or damaged body but about gaining a deeper sense of God’s allness. The body will adjust to a normal state of health because of the shift in thought from a material to a spiritual basis.
Similarly, the right house, relationship, and so on come about because we perceive through prayerful listening something more of the harmony of being – the good that is continuous and perfect. This is human consciousness yielding to the light of divine Spirit, not God being conscious of the perfect situation for us and moving things around to suit us.
Christ Jesus lived that spiritual understanding of God, which lifted so many around him to a fuller sense of unlimited good, liberating and transforming their thoughts and lives for the better. He taught and practiced a spiritual understanding of God that couldn’t be defined by matter or doctrine.
There is a divine influence – Christ – at work, reaching receptive hearts and spiritualizing perceptions of infinite good. Spirit and its ideas are never material, never lacking – never anything less than perfect God and His perfect expression. Healing reflects the degree to which this fact dawns in thought and transforms our perception from matter and its limitations, to Spirit and its illimitable ideas.
As we gain a clearer sense of what God, Spirit, is and what divine intelligence does, we’ll come to enjoy a more substantial sense of comfort, security, and freedom in the understanding of God as truly unconfined. As our understanding of God and His activity becomes less material, our receptivity to and desire to worship the Father in Spirit will give us opportunities to expand our sense of the infinite and experience more freedom.
Adapted from an article published in the July 31, 2023, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.