This week's favourite thoughts

From the Bible:

For the LORD taketh pleasure in his people: he will beautify the meek with salvation.

There is much in this verse to bring comfort.  I love the idea that the Lord takes pleasure in His people... in us... in me.  God is my Father, so I'm glad I please Him.  My earthly father was of the type to help me look away from earth toward God.

"He will beautify the meek with salvation."  This thought has great value, I think.  An article entitled "Growing new, not old," published in the Christian Science Sentinel for May 22, 1989, started with this encouraging thought:

Many people these days seem caught up in an effort to avoid growing old.  We're offered products to make us look younger, products to make us feel younger.  We're even encouraged to act younger.  The underlying message is "Growing old is bad, so do everything you can to stay young." That message, thought, unthinkingly assumes that the opposite of "old" has to be "young." In fact, there's another way to look at it.  The opposite of "old" can also be "new." Pursuing this line of thought, we can do a great deal in the right direction and get beyond just trying to hang on to an elusive thing called "youth."

Salvation is here and now as we open our hearts to God's way and will, and quit making it up for ourselves as we go along.  As one woman wrote, drily, "The wisdom of man is not sufficient to warrant him in advising God."  (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 3)  Part of the "newness" we must strive for daily is the new sense of ourselves as God's dearly-loved ideas, His reflection.  It is a worthwhile project, and it makes us beautiful to the degree it results in us being as loving to others as our Father is to us.


From Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 506:

The calm and exalted thought or spiritual apprehension is at peace.  Thus the dawn of ideas goes on, forming each successive stage of progress.

This was of great comfort to me this week.  An event in a grown child's life opened my unguarded thought to the memory of the same kind of milestone in my life over 30 years ago.  Her experience was (thankfully) different from mine.  She had a party and spent a happy evening with the family and friends who had supported her throughout her extended quest for a college degree.  Mine was so different that, for the first time, I realized how humanly sad my experience was compared to the normal ways one marks such an event.  As the feelings threatened to overwhelm me, I reached for the Bible Lesson, and found the thought quoted above.

Calm and exalted thought is that which has lifted its perception up from earthly seeming to spiritual truth.  Ideas dawn in their order, unfolding as they are needed or we are ready.  When one's thought is attentively fixed on God, His ideas can be absorbed, and progress immediately ensues.  In meditating on that idea, I realized that my experience so many years ago was valid, and that it had led to this moment when I was ready to see it and counter its mortal effects with "spiritual apprehension" of divine Love.  The emotional sadness I felt was keen, but temporary.  God was right there, comforting me and lifting me up to see that the unhappy experience which was not what I would have humanly wanted  never really happened to my true self, which reflects God and His love.  The truth is, I did graduate, with honors, and my family was proud of me.  My education has served me well in the intervening years, giving me the ability to work and earn money, as well as to learn and comprehend more than I might have without the education.  There were experiences I never had, but God was not missing from my life, even so.  As I learned to sit at His feet and listen, I have known more love and more hope than I ever could have gleaned from even the best of my family and friends.  And, today, I can celebrate with this adult child, who is not mine but who is just as dear to me as if she was.  My sadness is healed as I become absorbed in God, divine Love.