Dissolving barriers to achievement

AFTER seventeen years of selling and managing property, a woman I know wanted to have her own office. This required a broker's license, so she took the examination. She failed. Yet she regarded this as only a temporary setback. Instead of yielding to frustration, she resolved to persist in achieving the license. Throughout her family and business experience she had seen God's goodness manifested in many situations, and this challenge was no exception. Although she was a senior citizen, she did not doubt her God-derived ability to achieve a legitimate goal. As a longtime Christian Scientist she knew that difficulties signal a need to know God better. So she asked a Christian Science practitioner to support her with prayer as she began this new activity.

This prayer brought confidence and expectancy of good. A firm, clear sense of God's allness, love, wisdom, and righteous judgment began to develop. The prayer was a deep acknowledgment that God, divine Mind, is the only genuine Mind and expresses in its creation, man, intelligence, comprehension, insight, accuracy. It included an affirmation that the power of divine Love is universally expressed through the Christ, the divine influence in human thought revealing God's ever-presence and power. The woman began to realize that every need can be brought to fulfillment through an understanding of Love's omnipotence.

The general conviction that growing older brings with it deterioration of faculties, forgetfulness, inability to retain details was challenged strongly through prayer. The basis for this refutation was the spiritual fact that man, as God's image, is never less that the active, complete, indestructible spiritual expression of infinite Mind. This prayer brought a rich, satisfying sense of man's true spiritual individuality -- now and forever inseparable from God, the source of all wisdom and goodness.

With this prayerful commitment to God, thorough preparation for the examination went forward. On the scheduled day the woman took the four-hour exam. In a few weeks word came that she had passed, and she was jubilant!

When we become humble enough to listen for God's direction, barriers to achievement disappear, right steps to take become plain to us, and we feel our Father, divine Mind, guiding us to new plateaus that promise even more of His boundless goodness.

We need to put off pride in personal ability and to put off any unwillingness to conform to God's commandment that we love Him above all else -- that we yield to His will alone.

Christ Jesus presented the truth that is the core of individual achievement when he said, ``This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.''1 By his own example, Jesus proved man's sonship with God, with eternal Life itself. He brought the glory and power of God to human consciousness so that mankind could be free from limitation, free from sin, sickness, fear of failure. The Master said plainly that his words and works came from his Father, who was always with him because his actions pleased God.2

Any desired, worthy goal is achievable in proportion as we acknowledge God as the source of all resources and come to discern our true selfhood, which is spiritual and unlimited. Even our first obedient steps bring a wonderful view of vast possibilities because we are seeing more and more of God's limitless, universal goodness. We're grasping something enduring and changeless.

In the textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the author, Mary Baker Eddy,3 writes: ``We apprehend Life in divine Science only as we live above corporeal sense and correct it. Our proportionate admission of the claims of good or of evil determines the harmony of our existence, -- our health, our longevity, and our Christianity.''4

How needful, then, for us to ``live above corporeal sense and correct it'' by achieving spiritual maturity, which brings an ever clearer sense of man's timeless, immortal being, inseparable from God.

1John 17:3. 2See John 8:28, 29. 3The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. 4Science and Health, p. 167.

You can find more articles like this one in the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine. DAILY BIBLE VERSE: Is any thing too hard for the Lord? Genesis 18:14