Prayer's retroactive power

True prayer is suffused with God's timeless power. It is based on the understanding of the spiritual and eternal nature of things. God, Life, Love, is unending good. And He has made everything -- man and the universe -- to express this good. Not in a material way, but spiritually and eternally.

For most of us, time is such a basic ingredient of daily living that to even doubt its veracity is like doubting our own identity. Yet God's immortal creation is good, spiritual, and timeless.m When we understandingly affirm this view and make it mroe and mroe our own, our prayers cut across time, reaching into whakt we call the past and bringing about change.

This is not to say we must scrub yesterday and everything about it off our mental slate. But from a spiritual point of view, the troubles of yesterday never had a valid claim to reality. So their apparent effects on today can be canceled out.

Rember the Bible story of Lazarus's healing? It's worth looking at again. He had been dead and buried for four days by the time Christ Jesus got to him. Lazarus's sister believed Jesus could have saved Lazarus if he'd got there earlier. But apparently everyone doubted his power to restore Lazarus after four days.

Time was no barrier to Jesus, though. He exercised, through prayer, the power of spiritual understanding to break the chains of traditionally accepted concepts, especially that fundamental assumption: "It has already happened, so it's too late now." Jesus said to God: "I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always." And he called Lazarus forth. n1

n1 See John 11;

Maybe that healing seems too far beyond our present abilities to serve as a relevant example. But the fundamentals, the spiritual truths involved, definitely apply to us today. And they're something we can exercise, even if just in a degree.

Leths take a look at another example. Years ago I took a test for which I was thoroughly prepared. I was surprised indeed when I got the results bacn and they were poor. Then I prayed. (Remember, this is afterm the test had been taken adn graded.) My prayer included an affirmation that God, Mind, governs all justly and intelligently. God always has done so and always will.It was an affirmation that brought into play prayer's retroactive power.

The next day I was told of a mistake that had been discovered in the scoring, and my grade was changed to an A. Of course, the altering of the test score is inconsequential now. But the experience proved once again that spiritual truths always have an effect for good.

Mary Baker Eddy n2 writes -- and it's a statement that could well be included in almost any prayer -- "Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need." n3 The words contain a promise for the future. But look again. They also have an assurance for the past. "Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need."

n2 Mrs. Eddy is the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science;

n3 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m p. 494.

Don't lock yourself into the notion that a certain problem, certain damage, is irrevocable because it's in the past. Our prayers today can reach back and resolve the problems of yesterday -- when those prayers are suffused with the power of Love and the understanding of God's timeless creation. DAILY BIBLE VERSE Behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. . . . Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. And he arose, and departed to his hous. Matthew 9:2, 6, 7