Never Stuck
OUR farm has heavy soil. When it gets wet the tractors sink quickly and get stuck. Work still needs to be done, though, and my husband does his best to get through. Every now and then, however, when he's hauling a particularly heavy load, it sinks. Then he needs me to pull him out. It is never a big deal. I simply get another tractor on safe ground and attach a chain to pull the stuck tractor out.
During my last trip to help my husband, this Bible passage from Paul's letter to the Galatians came to my thought: ``Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Bear ye one another's burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ'' (6:1, 2).
Doesn't this show us what divine Love is? God is Love. And the nature of Love is to help us without condemning us and to direct us back to our one and only work of reflecting good, God. As the offspring of God, working from a spiritual and not a material standpoint, we naturally help one another.
To understand that God, Mind, not only makes us, His creation, intelligent, innocent, and progressive, but also gives us dominion is the only safe standpoint from which to pull when we need to help one another get ``unstuck.'' A mortal feeling of superiority or inferiority gets nobody anywhere! Neither standing there and criticizing nor feeling inadequate is going to give us any power to get ourselves or anyone else unstuck.
God, divine Love, is the only power. Understanding God and ourselves as His spiritual creation, man, is the chain that we use to pull ourselves free when we get stuck. Just as it isn't my husband that is stuck when the tractor gets mired, so God's man isn't stuck in the beliefs of sin or sickness. But we still need to give up the belief that we're sick or sinning mortals. As we correct the false sense that life is--or ever was--in matter, Christ's divine influence in thought pulls us out of this false se nse into the recognition of life in Spirit, God. Then it's clear that mortality never was part of us.
We may not be able to do this all at once, but we can make a start. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, urges: ``Teach your students the omnipotence of Truth, which illustrates the impotence of error. The understanding, even in a degree, of the divine All-power destroys fear, and plants the feet in the true path,--the path which leads to the house built without hands `eternal in the heavens''' (p. 454). Man can only express Truth, God. T he lie that man is sinful, sick, or foolish cannot be part of God's reflection, man. And no one can be stuck in that lie.
If people seem trapped in fear or anger over community or world conditions, it is useless for us to become fearful or agitated along with them. Why should we get stuck too? When we keep on the dry, solid ground of understanding that man reflects what God knows and Love speaks, we are able to act accordingly! With the ``chain of true knowledge, or divine Science, we are on solid ground and can help others get there too. The children of God are created to manifest Love and Truth. What better way to do this
than to keep ourselves and others out of the muck of materiality? By understanding our spiritual identity as God's child, we can fulfill the law of Christ and thus help others and ourselves.
