Seek out the spiritual lesson

March 29, 2019 | 22 comments

Every trial and challenge we face serves a purpose. There is a spiritual lesson to learn from that experience that makes us a better person and brings us closer to God.

When faced with trying circumstances, it can be helpful to ask, “What is the spiritual lesson I’m supposed to learn from this?”

Decades ago, when suffering horribly from a cold for days on end, I asked the question, “What am I supposed to learn from this?” And in a moment of complete honesty, I remembered that right before the cold hit me, I had gotten very discouraged about something in my life. It was a moment of feeling utterly weak about my future. The cold slammed me soon after.

I put the two together, realizing that my temporary feeling of weakness on the inside, showed up as physical weakness on the outside.

The spiritual lesson I needed to learn was apparent. I needed to stay more alert to keeping my thought in a strong spiritual state, and to not give into suggestions of helplessness or weakness. The cold I thought was my problem, was not the problem. The trial I faced was about demonstrating better mental and spiritual immunity to suggestions of error. This in turn, would protect me mentally and physically in the future. And this has proved to be the case.

Once I discerned the above lesson, my cold healed quickly, and I’ve done a much better job since that time of stopping symptoms quicker, or avoiding them altogether.

Life is not an accident. Life is meant to be good. Any challenge to that good is an opportunity to learn more about the goodness of God that overcomes that challenge and leaves it behind. The quicker we learn the spiritual lesson, the faster we progress.

22 thoughts on “Seek out the spiritual lesson”

  1. This is indeed the truth and a lesson I recently had to learn. I developed an unexpected cold and I couldn’t figure the cause. I thought about it and realised it came about soon after I held unkind thoughts towards two people I often work with. Soon after changing my thoughts I started feeling better and things with the two people also improved.

  2. Thank U for the reminder. It’s always about thought
    Our experiences always reminded us “ to stand porter at the door…”

  3. This is so helpful – thank you, Evan!! I especially love the sentences, “Life is not an accident. Life is meant to be good(….)

    We think events befall us and we suffer. But both the suffering and the “triggering events” are symptoms of limited views. A symptom is connected to a limited view like an echo is connected to a voice. Stop yelling, and the echo will stop. Remove the cause by learning the lesson, and the would-be symptom will disappear into the night.

  4. Thank you Evan. I had almost the same situation last winter with the belief of flu. I’ve been learning we never lack good or any daily resources needed, since God gives us all good, all the time. I think Mrs. Eddy mentions somewhere in her writings about handling what’s called the ‘leading error’?
    I’ve learned we need to be very alert to every lie of material sense as it appears on the mental horizon and replace it with the truth of God’s
    all-ness, goodness as immediately as possible. Since God is omnipotent, there is nothing except Divine love. I’ve also learned it’s our duty to express Joy daily with ourselves. Our family, our friends, our kitties and everybody else we meet. Divine Life is a rainbow and we are one of the many colors it represents!

  5. Thank you, Evan and All, for these spiritual uplifting
    thoughts. I love the analogies, Craig, with the unkind thoughts and seeming cold ~ Jay, with the yelling and echo and Melissa, with Divine Love and the colors of the rainbow. Jesus spoke in parables and these seemingly
    simple expressions of sharing are really very profound.

  6. I’ve never liked the insinuation that we are “guilty” or even responsible for “why” we got sick. I think we have enough guilt and self-blame in our lives, not to put this extra heavy burden on us. I believe that there is No Cause for illness or sickness and the sooner we realize this the better! Remember: “There is but one primal cause……no effect from any other cause……no reality in aught which does not proceed from this great and only cause.” p. 207, S&H. I don’t think in C.S. we are on a “witch hunt” to find out where that darn cold came from! I actually got the Flu last year when I was dedicated to studying C.S. and keeping my thought uplifted. This year I didn’t even get a Cold and I wasn’t studying much at all or working to spiritualize my Thought! Go Figure!!

    1. Hi Bevi…My wife expressed these same sentiments to me one time and it made me aware of how people can intrepret a statement a variety of different ways. I explained to my wife that C.S. doesn’t “blame” people for the bad things that happen to them anymore than people “blame” a child in first grade for making a mistake in addition or subtraction. To me, C.S. makes us aware of how much God loves us and therefore helps us understand that we are maintained in perfect harmony and to me that is so helpful. C.S. helps us come to an understanding of our true identity. But just like the first grader, sometimes we are only inspired to learn more when we are challenged by getting the wrong answer. As Mrs. Eddy wrote in S&H, trials can be proving times of our understanding of God’s care for us and result in us having to decide whether we really believe some of the truths we are stating or we are just stating them without really understanding them. And I’ve found that “proving times” often come more when we ARE studying C.S. more fervently than when we are not. Kind of like when you were in school. You didn’t get tested when you were not studying a new subject. You got tested when you were studying a new subject. That’s just my two cents. I respect your view too and thank you for sharing your views with us! Much love to you Bevi!

      1. Thanks, Brian, for your loving response! I just can’t buy into the idea that the more we study, the more we will be tested and subjected to proving ourselves. Sounds like an anthropomorphic God, which is definitely not C.S.! We need to stay out of the Relative and get into the Absolute! There is no Evil and there is No Cause for Evil! What a deterrent to wanting to study C.S. to say that the more we study the more problems we will have. I think it is really the opposite! Mortal mind has no power to cause disease or to cure it. It’s All Mind! Stick with the absoluteness of the Scientific Statement of Being!

        1. Hi Bevi, When I read your response I had to ask myself “Wow, how did she interpret my comment like that?” But then I re-read my comment and realized how you might have interpreted my comment that way. 🙂

          I can assure you I don’t believe the more we study the more we are tested. Relatively speaking, I believe we are constantly being tested, whether we study or not. I just meant that as we are in the process of learning more of our Absolute identity, our study may (not always) tend to make us “more aware” of the false suggestions, and the consequences of believing those false suggestions, until we at last really learn the point we are trying to learn (i.e. more of our true identity) at which point the suggestions cease because those false suggestions are just so obviously unreal to us. And that “learning process” could happen instantaneously in some cases but may take longer in other cases.

          An analogy may be if you went to a Spanish-only speaking country. If you didn’t know Spanish, you would suffer from not being able to talk to people or read signs, etc. But you might just accept that situation and think there is nothing you can do about it. Compare that to a person who is learning Spanish but hasn’t yet mastered all of the aspects of Spanish. To that person, the inability to understand certain phrases of Spanish may seem more acute of a problem than the person in total ignorance. But the person that partially knows Spanish would still be better off than the person in total ignorance and if they kept studying until they mastered Spanish, they would no longer experience not being able to understand when Spanish was spoken to them or they had to read Spanish and therefore they would no longer suffer from not knowing Spanish.

          Scientific pathology illustrates the digestion of spiritual nutriment as both sweet and bitter, — sweet in expectancy and bitter in experience or during the senses’ assimilation thereof, and digested only when Soul silences the dyspepsia of sense. (My. 230:5-9 (to 1st .))

  7. I have found that if we don’t get the lesson at first, it just gets louder. I have been working on resolving a health issue for a number of years and I know it is the next stage to spiritual growth. It just got louder with something i can’t live with.
    I resisted looking up the actual disease in the periodicals but I did and found it in a article on Aging.
    This article added another piece to the puzzle which was very helpful. It was what I was being told for sometime but this little change in the message woke me up a bit.
    I have lived with one foot on the Truth and one foot in the lie. It is time to take dominion over my life and body at a new level, with both feet on the Truth. The falseness of duality has been a lifetime lesson.I feel the scales tip more and more toward the truth, and now a little leap and and a hop to the Truth. I read that the moment I reached to God for understanding which leads to healing, I was healed no matter what the body is screaming at me. Never thought of that.

  8. Frankly, I’ve never had a C.S. Practitioner ask me, when I’ve called for help and healing of a physical problem, “Now what did you do or think wrongly that caused this disease…?” No, they work on proving it’s unreality, not searching for a Cause…..because, as we learn in C.S…..there is No Cause. The whole thing, the guilt, the shame, the blame, the belief, are all Lies! Knowing the Truth is just That – Knowing the Truth! Don’t waste time on trying to figure out the Cause of a Lie – focus on the Truth and find Healing! I remember reading once how Mrs. Eddy said that we human beings waste more time trying to solve a problem that isn’t even Real! Also, I’ve found that there are a lot of Myths, Old Wives Tales and Superstitions that we’ve all picked up from Sunday School Teachers, Parents and yes, even from some Practitioners – like “what wrong thoughts were you thinking?” Or – “if you don’t read your Lesson you’ll have a bad day.” Or – “if you don’t go to Church you’re not a good, spiritual person.” So much of this guilt and shame is really just old human patterns of thought we picked up from our childhoods where we were shamed and made to feel bad about ourselves. I feel so many C.Sers could use a good course in Psychotherapy in order to see the learned Human Beliefs that we have carried over into our understanding of C.S. We need to be willing to separate out our Psychology, the Orthodoxy and our Culture from the true Science of Healing that Jesus taught and lived and that Mrs. Eddy brought forth for ALL to benefit from!

  9. Thank you Evan for today`s inspiring and very understandable SpiritView, so good!
    I thought, if I have to work out something to be healed, I love what Evan wrote above, i.e. “Life is ment to be good. And any challenge to that good is an opportunity to learn more about the goodness of God”, which heals. It is so so comforting. Than the thoughts came to me, what I can learn from a challenge is, to learn more about my real spiritual being as God`s loved child, to become more acquainted with my true spiritual identity designed by God. Am I thankful to learn this more and more through study in Christian Science!

    Thank you all for your so extensive and interesting comments and the link from Brian to what David Hohle said. A very lovely weekend to all of you 🙂

  10. There is a very good article in the February 18 Sentinel by Sue A Spotts called “Don’t connect the dots”. Sorry I don’t have a link for this but it I have found it very helpful.

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