God's Infinite Attention

ONE evening I had to bottle-feed my infant son, watch his sister, and make the supper all at once. By the time I put my son to bed, my daughter was outside, standing in a puddle in her new shoes. And by the time I brought her in, the cat was eating our supper.

I concluded that I was trying to juggle more activities than I could give attention to. This tendency is so common that we may mistakenly assume that it is true of God, too, and conclude that He could not possibly keep track of all that's going on throughout His creation. This misconception regarding the nature of Deity may cause us to feel afraid and vulnerable or lead us to believe that we are governed by chance.

But the capacities of God, divine Mind, are infinite. Our creator does not ignore parts of His creation while He focuses on others. No. Each facet of spiritual creation is perpetually cared for by divine intelligence--with no resulting diminution of the infinite capacity of divine Mind. That is what the term infinite implies.

As we turn to God in prayer, we find we can rely on His unlimited attention. God, Love, is fully able to govern man and the universe, so we can give up the fear that chance is ``running" everything. We will experience the intelligent guidance of divine Mind more fully as we spiritualize our sense of man. Man is in reality God's spiritual offspring, divine Mind's perfect idea. As Mind's idea, man reflects the intelligence, wisdom, and attentiveness of his creator.

Christ Jesus certainly demonstrated the power of spiritual understanding in his healing works! He knew that his ability came from God. As Paul writes in I Corinthians: ``Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God." As we acknowledge the spiritual nature of our true being, we are receptive to divine Mind's direction and better able to prove that all the intelligence we need is forever at hand.

My brother and I had an experience that illustrated this fact. We were driving home from college in a very old car. Past midnight, we were on a rural stretch of road. Seeing a bright light by a sign, we jounced off the road onto a rutted shoulder to check our oil. When we tried to start the car again, we found that nothing electrical would work.

We were not mechanics. But we prayed for divine Mind's direction. We affirmed that we expressed intelligence as God's children. And we knew that even though we seemed to be in an isolated place, God was caring for us. He was not ``too busy" to govern us and this situation.

We found a piece of wire under the front seat. Nothing in the maze of wires behind the dashboard seemed loose or broken, but we felt we should fasten the wire from the battery through the dash to a particular place. Everything worked!

As we continued on, we rejoiced at the way we had been led to do the right thing. Even the wire we needed was at hand, left by the previous owner of the car. We had not been abandoned by God to chance or left to shiver in the dark until help arrived.

Writing of the infinity of divine Mind, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, says in Miscellaneous Writings: ``If Mind, God, is all-power and all-presence, man is not met by another power and presence, that--obstructing his intelligence--pains, fetters, and befools him." Reliance on the infinity of Mind enables us to experience ever-present intelligence, which brings harmony to our lives.