“Principle loved, embraced…sustained me”

In recent months when I assumed new responsibility for our family’s finances, huge swaths of debt and unpaid bills were discovered, plus the knowledge that many large expenses loomed in the next month or so.  Our financial condition was precarious.  I was aware that immediate action was needed, but I was totally flummoxed by what I confronted and in a state of panic.  My thoughts were jumbled, and it was a challenge to pray or think coherently.      

My daughter, also a class taught Christian Scientist, insisted that I call a practitioner.  I generally do not call on practitioners for help.  It’s a silly ego trick that mortal mind plays and with which I am complicit.  Resistance to ask for help was especially strong in this situation, because I felt shame and guilt in how this had turned out and wanted no one else to know our predicament.  But our financial situation was serious and I had nowhere else to turn, so I contacted a practitioner friend with whom I had worked many years earlier.

When I called my friend I was at my desk, pen in hand, ready to scribble whatever he said.  I was expecting to be on the business end of a fire hose of metaphysical truths, then immediately dive into the books and study relentlessly.  But that’s not what happened.  What I heard wasn’t a torrent of words but a calm and brief statement about the nature of divine Principle – and what dawned in thought was a fresh view of divine reality that was grander than anything I had previously conceived. 

My understanding to that point of Principle had been anything but light-filled.  Principle to me was abstract and rather chilly, simply another term for an aggregation of spiritual rules and laws that were applicable like math theorems.  But the sense of Principle that was unfolding in my thought was Life itself – alive, real and tangible.  I saw within moments that this Principle loved, embraced, undergirded, overshadowed, enveloped, maintained, and sustained me.  When the practitioner calmly stated that “there is no indebtness in Principle,” it wasn’t mere encouragement, a spurt of positive thinking or something I just wanted to be true.  I knew it was a clear statement of a concrete scientific fact. 

I hung up the phone.  The fear had completely disappeared.   I felt changed.  Within the next few days and weeks I started in to make necessary human adjustments. There was a blizzard of details to work through, but all was accomplished with wisdom and clarity.  Within a month our household finances were in the black, within six months the mountain of debt had been cleared out sufficiently so that our credit rating had risen to a normal and acceptable level.    

Of course I’m happy about the turnaround to our family finances.  But with this new view of Principle something has fundamentally changed in me.  I feel spiritually empowered.  The Lesson has come alive for me.  I have found courage to face up to and make decisions that were necessary.  I feel newly empowered to pray for others, and have helped bring about several recent healings including chest pains, difficulty breathing, and unjust legal situations.