Letting go of fear

A Christian Science perspective.

A few years ago, our family relocated because of my husband’s job. Like many moves, this one involved big expenses and debt. There were expectations and promises from the employer that were not being kept, which left us without the funds needed to cover all our expenses. This happened during summertime, and since school was about to start, we’d need to pay the tuition for preschool, an expense added to an already over-extended budget.

I began to pray to overcome my fear of not having enough money to pay our bills. I found inspiration in Jesus’ example of feeding thousands of people with five loaves of bread and two fish. What an amazing example of seeing God’s abundance where it didn’t appear to be! Christian Science explains that Jesus looked beneath the surface of not enough food to go around. He taught that God is the one supplying all we need and that God has infinite resources. I saw that I, too, could look below the surface and see God, not my husband’s employer, as the source of our supply.

I also found this passage helpful from “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” by
Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science: “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need” (p. 494). Divine Love is another name for God. I held on to the idea that God was meeting all our needs for food, home, and school. Once I got a handle on my fear and trusted God, I went about my day without fretting or trying to figure out how to get more income to pay for school.

A few days went by, and we received an anonymous check in the mail. It said it was from our “secret admirers.” The memo line said “for preschool,” and the amount would pay for the entire year of preschool tuition. It was also enough – to the penny – to pay off credit card expenses from our move.

We hadn’t told anyone about our need for money. But at the same time that I let go of my fear, our “admirers” were inspired with the thought to help us.

We were so grateful to see this expression of how God was meeting all our needs, but we also saw this as a command to pay off our remaining debts. I continued to pray to see that harmful debt was not a part of God’s plan for us or anyone else. Jesus included this thought in the Lord’s Prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”
(Matt. 6:11, 12). First, God gives us daily provision, and then we can pay our debts to others.

We started to get ideas and inspiration on ways to save money, sell things to help pay down debt, and find money from sources we didn’t know we had. Within a month, we’d paid off $20,000 of debt and school expenses, without a raise in pay. God met our needs in ways that we never expected.

Lack – of money, of friends and companionship, of education or employment, of good health – involves fear that something bad will happen because we don’t have enough of what we think we need. But the Bible counsels, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding” (Prov. 3:5). This trust helps us let go of fear and leave the outcome to God. Then our needs are met.

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