A woman told me she didn’t feel close to God. She said the crisis facing her family felt overwhelming and made her feel helpless and left wondering, “Will God ever help me?”
I replied, “God is the authority, dominion, power and wisdom you express in dealing with the family troubles.”
She was stunned with awe at my comment, she later told me. She had never thought of God in such intimate terms as being dominion and authority expressed through her. She had been harboring a distant sense of God as being a far off power waiting to be summoned to the scene that may or may not respond.
This is a common error, I find, in my interaction with people seeking God’s help. They hold a material sense of God as being, perhaps a person, like Jesus, that occupies a physical space and is remote to their immediate experience. Or they might follow a contradictory concept of God where on one hand they intellectually proclaim God as all-powerful but on the other don’t believe their affirmation because they also believe evil is real and powerful.
When a person believes in evil, their faith in God is sapped.
Christian Science is the one teaching in the world that totally solves the good versus evil dilemma that the human mind so often gets caught up in. Evil is not real, it instructs. Evil is illusion of the human mind, and the human mind that believes it is illusion too.
Understanding God, and I mean TRULY understanding God, to be all-powerful good, destroys the illusion. This is accomplished by degrees in the human experience, but nonetheless happens as the pilgrim faithfully treks down the path the Master Jesus Christ has mapped out before us.
Jesus conquered all evil, including death, and we will too. And the sooner, the better.
But back to, “How close is God?”
God is never separate from our life and existence. God is the substance of every good quality, every virtue, and every moral and spiritual action we take. God IS the good we live and express, and CAN live and express. As offspring of the divine, we are God in action.
I love this definition of God from the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy:
GOD. The great I AM; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence.
God is the “I,” and we are the “AM.” Now, how much closer to God can we get than that!
Happy day!
That is really awesome! Thanks, Evan.
Evan,
What you said about God being the spiritual qualities we express blew me away, too. I had always seen God as Love and we (man) as the expression of Love in the attributes of kindness, love, tenderness and so on, which made a separation for me. Kind of God is the source and we are the reflection, never to mix or blend -separate.
But when you say that God IS these things that we express, suddenly God is here and the separation is dissolved. There is a power and oneness that is new and I want to understand it better.
I feel as though you’ve touched upon something profound and huge and I really want to know more about God in this way. Would you please comment further?
Evan,
Yes indeed, MM tries to keep Truth separate from us in the “here and now” in every way. BUT, as we see and accept that the good we are expressing here and now IS God-in-action and not some “far off divine event” we are truly empowered to have and use and feel and see MORE of this wonderfulness!!!
Thank you, Evan, for your clarity.
Last night I was high in the California Sierra mountains, gazing at the clear, calm, silent, star-studded night…with such…awe, realizing how much God is loving and enjoying Her creation! Then I was privileged to have the thought: “And that includes who I am, right this minute!”
We are blessed of our Father.
To anon #2,
Like water is inseparable from wet, God is inseparable from man/woman. In essence, God is the water, we are the wet. But you cannot separate the two. So whatever “gets wet” feels the water. Whatever “feels the water,” gets wet. It’s all sort of one and the same.
The belief of separation is a time/space belief. In Mind, there is no time or space to separate God from God’s ideas. There is no space between Love and Love’s loving expression. God is Love in action, and man/woman is Love’s loving expression. But man/woman cannot exist separate from Love, for then there would be no loving expression, anymore than wet could exist without water. It takes both.
So, whenever you express spiritual power and authority you are expressing God in action. The power behind the expression is God, and you are blessed by it.
It’s now July 16, 2009 and I found your comments about God have answered my morning prayer for clarity in describing God not as a mortal but as the gentle Presence of good and intelligence within. It is easier to understand Oneness when viewed this way. Thank you so much, Evan.
Carolyn