“I’m not in a battle with what everybody else thinks anymore.”

Thank you for this assignment. I was struck by the sweetness of the testimonies. Revisiting history has a way of making things seem sweeter, clearer, or easier to handle than current things are. Even the most challenging situation has a nostalgia about it; places that were so bleak and foreboding seem like home. There’s a Soul-sense of appreciation aroused throughout. I love the simplicity and candor. Such deep sincerity.

This assignment has been very helpful for me and has produced much good for church as well, helping me to love more and fear less, to worry less about “others”, and to trust more to one Mind working all good for all. One loving Father is guiding, guarding, and governing each individual’s work, so each one can help and honor, without fear of reproach—because there is no reproach harboring in me.

The testimony beginning on page 54, where the woman was asked to hold the thought “There is no power apart from God” really set me to work. I rephrased it: “There is no Mind apart from God.” As I worked with this, many minds that I hadn’t confronted before came into view—mental tyrants, gods many and lords many, emulations, standards of conduct, souls and spirits of relatives, other Scientists. And it was very hard to refute them, to not go into panic/fight mode or to beat a retreat. I learned to steadfastly have one God, one Mind, and to say, “not my will, but Thine.” Quietly refusing to be bullied by body or by know-it-all vanity, having the Mind of Christ—Christlike, Christian—won sweet carols of victory. It has brought me to a new place of confidence and courage, a place of freedom from human strife and from trying so hard. 

I now have more faith in the truth of being than in error, more faith in God than in man, more faith in living than in dying, as Mrs. Eddy puts it. I have been able to stand firmer when assailed, when mental tyrants try to undermine my confidence or strip me of self-worth.

Earlier, this question had come to me: Who would I be if I weren’t kowtowing to or resisting human thoughts and persons or (what I recently unmasked) human psychology or necromancy—the dead souls and spirits of human opinion? Who must I be scientifically, that mortal dread—fear and damnation and complication arising from the second Chapter of Genesis—tries to keep me from considering? 

The creations of God are good, all good, rejoicing the heart, free from dread.

This quote in the Monitor from basketball player Jeremy Lin about sums it up: “How does Lin explain his sudden success?” ‘I felt I needed to prove I can play in this league. But I’ve surrendered that to God. I’m not in a battle with what everybody else thinks anymore,’ he told the San Jose Mercury News.”