“How close God is to the minutiae of our lives and how all is under the control of the divine Mind”
/I wanted to share a healing that I had earlier this year and how the inspiration I gleaned from Association helped me.
For the past several years, I have been in a difficult employment situation. As a government attorney, I found myself being extremely overworked due to mean-spirited and incompetent executive managers in my department who made my working environs less than pleasant. Moreover, their unprofessional conduct towards me, coupled with their inability to properly manage our division was evident to many of my colleagues, and even to outside organizations. It was an open secret that I was doing the jobs of both executive managers for the division in which I was assigned. In addition to doing their jobs, my position was easily the work of two to three other attorneys. My colleagues and husband were concerned that the strain and stress of this position was taking a significant mental and physical toll on me.
Due to the excessive demands being made upon me, and the long hours I needed to work, my husband and closest friends in the workplace encouraged me to quit because they could not see a human solution. It was not uncommon for me to work 60-80 plus hours a week. I was forced to deal with an excessive workload in an environment where my executive managers were rather petty and jealous of my professional success. They took particular relish in offering my work product as their own and had no compunction in dumping their assignments on me and making my work life rather difficult.
However, during the last couple of years of working out this situation, I had a growing sense of how much God values his idea man. In fact this growing conviction enabled me be the practitioner for a fellow association member, who had an extraordinary healing of being unemployed. This growing conviction also enabled me to heal another patient of a severe migraine. For both of these patients, I was led to pray about how valued the patient was to God and how each one had a right place and purpose. You can imagine my joy when the mother of the young woman who was healed of the migraine told me that her daughter was struggling with employment and purpose in life and was awed that although no one told me these things, that I had been specifically addressing these issues in my prayer. Needless to say, I was able to share with her the ideas that I had been praying with so diligently over the last couple of years!
In the midst of this struggle, there were moments of light. I worked diligently with this thought from Science & Health: “This scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man’s absorption into Deity and the loss of his identity, but confers upon man enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive love, a higher and more permanent peace.“ (S&H p. 265:10-15)
I strove to understand more of this “enlarged individuality” I had as God’s expression—and I also worked to give up the claim that I was a limited mortal stuck at the hands of other mortals. I found that these insights enabled me to meet the impossible demands being placed upon me and meet the constant deadlines being imposed on me. I had learned that stress and strain were impossible for God’s man to experience, and that they were impositions that must been seen as illusory.
Although I had learned many important spiritual lessons during the last few years in dealing with unenlightened mortal mind, admittedly I was a bit flummoxed that I had not seen a complete healing in this area of my life. And yet, I knew this was not outside my thinking and there was a spiritual solution.
Since the beginning of 2019, I tried to ask for transfers out of my present assignment and my managers repeatedly denied my requests. (Their denials were self-serving; they had no one else with my expertise to do their jobs for them.) Realizing that that avenue was not helpful, I started looking for jobs outside the government due to this impossible work situation. Admittedly, these actions seemed to be the result of desperation and not spiritual leadings.
Shortly before Association, I have to admit that the human picture looked far worse. I found it difficult to fully focus on the Association assignment due to being so overworked, and also because I could not seem to get dominion over a long-standing claim of a physical problem. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and down about the whole situation. The oppressiveness of my work situation seemed to be a dark cloud over me.
However, during Association, you had mentioned that man is not under the curse of materialism. That statement woke me up. I really loved that thought, and it got my thinking heading in the right direction again. Although admittedly the inspiration I had gleaned from Association seemed to have a head on-collision with the material picture when I returned to work, because I had the roughest period of my career after Association.
One morning, I was struggling with not wanting to go to work, feeling overwhelmed, etc. and I turned to prayer. I reviewed the healings that were meaningful to me, insights I had gleaned from working this work situation out over a period of time, and also pondering about how as God’s expression, I was not under the curse of materialism. I turned to my growing conviction of how valued man is to God.
During this prayer, it dawned on me that when you really value a picture or other possession, you put it in the best place possible. I then realized that because God loves his creation, he puts each of us in the best place possible because he values us. He cherishes us. He wants us to shine. That thought was a great comfort and I worked with that inspired idea for days afterwards. It was such a new thought to me and I was so grateful for this angel message.
Then the human situation reached an absolute breaking point with the conduct of my executive managers and the insistent, and untenable demands they were constantly making on me. My former supervisor said at the time, “If I didn’t know better, I would say they are purposefully trying to kill you.”
This breaking point took place in Mid-May, in fact Thursday May, 9th to be exact!
I went home that night from work part praying, part ruminating. I literally felt I could take no more. My husband encouraged me to walk into work the next day and quit. Although I was appreciative of the unwavering support of my husband, deep down inside, I felt that quitting was not the answer, because my spiritual sense was telling me that quitting in this instance would be human will.
So I locked myself in our back office and spent most of the night struggling with frustration, exhaustion, disappointment, human will, and aggravation. But I persevered and got to really quiet place in thought. I then turned to Jonah and the Whale and found insights in that Bible story to sustain me. (Although let’s admit it, I was still somewhat in “I do not want to go to Nineveh mode.”)
Hymn 304 was especially meaningful as well. I knew intellectually that I was not in this hopeless circumstance; and I kept denying that God’s man could be oppressed by mortal mind. I challenged human will and the thought that quitting or fixing the material circumstances would be healing. Although I had been looking for other employment at the time, nothing had panned out and in that moment, I had decided that I would not look for another job, or wish I was somewhere else, unless I felt spiritually led to apply for other jobs. I resolved that my focus was to be that my sole employment was to serve God. I refused to go to bed until my thought was clear on this issue.
It was a struggle. Let’s face it – it was so easy to cling to the human picture. But the reality is that even if every mortal in the universe agreed that in the illusion of life in matter, you were being wronged – what would that get you? It surely wouldn’t get you Truth. It wouldn’t give you the Kingdom. So I needed to resist any temptation to let this mortal illusion define me – I needed to see that my employment was governed by God – and God alone. Moreover, I clung to the insight that God so values his idea man, that God only places man in the place where man could shine the most.
I went to bed and my husband noted that I seemed to be in a better place. Much to my husband’s surprise, I told him that I was not quitting my job. I woke up the next day, which was a Friday, and went to work. Nothing had changed in my work experience at all, nothing. What had changed is that it didn’t seem to get to me. I felt that I was in a cocoon of being valued by God, no matter what the material picture seemed to be presenting.
At 4:30 p.m. that day my cell phone rang. It was an elected official who was in an administrative position to oversee me and the administrators above me. I did not have a relationship with her – she explained to me that she had an immediate need for an interim policy advisor for six to nine months while her full-time staff member was out on extended medical leave. She wanted to offer me the job and asked me if I had time to meet her the following Monday morning to discuss it further.
On the following Monday, I met with her, and she told me that when her policy deputy fell ill, she had numerous people she could have called. However, the thought came to her that it should be me, even though she did not know me. She told me that I had left a lasting impression on her based on a presentation that she and other elected officials had attended a couple of years ago! When the thought came to her that I should be her interim policy deputy she started having me checked out and the more she found out about me and my background, the more she was convinced that she wanted only me to be in this interim position.
Then at the end of our meeting she shook my hand and welcomed me aboard. She then said to me, “I want you to know how valued you are, and that I think you are special.” I have never had a boss say that to me, let alone one that I have yet to work for. The fact that she said that to me, after years of working in a place where to human sense I was so devalued due to what would appear to be petty and jealous executive managers – was astonishing for me. My constant turning to God’s valuation of me, as his idea, was being demonstrated in my experience.
Due to the fact that her policy deputy was on medical leave, she could not hire a new person to replace her. It was much better for her to “borrow” another person from a government agency and have that person on her staff.
So had I quit my job, I wouldn’t have been able to assume this interim position. I started this position in June and will probably be there until February or so. It has been an amazing experience, and it is a wonderful temporary job to have.
As an aside, and proof that God has a sense of humor, the executive managers that have treated me so poorly, who never said thank you, dumped work on me, publicly treated me in unprofessional ways, now all are falling over themselves and being effusive with praise about me. Basically, the elected official I temporarily work for has a direct impact on this government agency’s budget. So the government agency has to respond to any requests I make – so it is a bit like they report to me. I can make them write reports, etc., call meetings, etc. My colleagues have had a good chuckle at how these managers were so transparent and extremely worried about what I will tell this elected official about their treatment of me. My managers have no clue that the spiritual lessons I have learned prevent me from being tempted to abuse my position to get back at them.
I am still awed by this experience. It showed me how close God is to the minutiae of our lives and how all truly is under the control of the Divine Mind. Moreover, I have seen how divine intelligence is far superior to human will. God’s plan has been far better than anything I could have humanly engineered. However, what really stands out in this experience is that this change in employment was directly related to the change in my thinking. When I took a stand against trying to humanly work out the situation and instead chose to rely on the divine, it meant that this illusion could not have power over me. How else could you explain why an elected official whom I do not know managed to get a hold of my personal cell phone number, and offered me a job, sight unseen?
I do not know if I will return to the government agency I was employed by after this interim position is over, I am still praying about that. But obviously I have such greater trust in Mind’s unfoldment of my career after this experience. I think it is fair to say that this healing of the work situation has encouraged me in all areas of my life. However, more important than the change in my job, is this growing sense of how valued each of us is to God. Without a doubt, I have had many healings over the years, and yet this one is my favorite for so many reasons. I am truly overjoyed to be able to share this experience with you. The light from Association fortified me to keep persevering!