One day when I was in high school, I was protected from being caught up in a school riot. My mother was a Christian Scientist, and she prayed for my sisters and me every day. That morning she had felt a strong intuition to pray especially for me. I’m sure she prayed until she felt the certainty that I was always in God’s care. Under the normal routine of my school day, I could easily have been caught in the middle of the riot, but my actions that day led me to just miss it.
Sensing a need, my mother had turned to the spiritual truths taught in Christian Science and drawn from the Holy Bible. Such truths have long brought protection to people in various ways.
A beloved psalm begins, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty” (91:1). This “secret place” isn’t a physical location. The Bible brings out that God is infinite Spirit, ever-present Love, present to fully care for us and keep us safe wherever we are.
This spiritual reality, which we all actually abide in, seems a secret because the material senses are not conscious of Spirit’s loving presence or the fact that all men and women in their true being are spiritual and abide safely in Love.
Over the centuries, though, God’s presence and power have been quietly at work in human consciousness, making spiritual reality known to humanity. Love continues to impart to human consciousness the spiritual understanding of God and the real nature of man, universally, as the expression of God.
God doesn’t make this understanding available to some and not to others. In the textbook of Christian Science, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” Mary Baker Eddy writes, “In divine Science, where prayers are mental, all may avail themselves of God as ‘a very present help in trouble.’ Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals. It is the open fount which cries, ‘Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters’” (pp. 12-13).
For God’s presence to be seen and felt here and now, materialistic thinking needs to give way to spiritual, Christly thinking. That’s why each of us needs the “adaptation and bestowals” of divine Love – the spiritual regeneration of thought and character and Love-imparted spiritual discernment that transform us.
Throughout his ministry, this is what Jesus’ message was all about. Jesus’ teachings urge on each one of us an ongoing discovery that even now we live in God, the creator of all – and therefore Spirit, not matter, is the source of our health, wholeness of being, supply, and security. Each of us is an idea of God, which means we represent, or express, God’s being and nature. Therefore we are whole and harmonious, and, inherently and foundationally, we exist forever in the allness of divine good.
The 91st Psalm promises that God “shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways” (verse 11). Prayer helps us yield to the truth of God’s ever-presence and power. Through prayer we put aside pride and self-will and humbly lean on God more habitually. The Christ – the Truth Jesus embodied and demonstrated – and the Holy Ghost, the divine Science of being that underlay his teachings and healings, regenerate our thoughts, so that they reflect more intelligence and goodness.
Jesus’ pure spiritual consciousness was an absolute “armour of light” (Romans 13:12) that banished all attempted intrusions of evil. Even the crucifixion did not destroy Jesus or stop his mission. Jesus allowed himself to be taken and crucified, because he knew it would end in his triumphant resurrection and subsequent ascension, both of which proved that his life, as well as the life of all of God’s children, was not in the hands of matter but is the expression of eternal Spirit, God.
Jesus knew we could all follow his teachings and example – not in one giant leap but by patiently following Christ each day, step by step, gaining victories over material sense and persistently attaining an ever higher spiritual sense of life as God created it. This kind of repentance lifts us into higher motives and purer thoughts. It enables us to more fully understand and feel the naturalness, or reality, of good and the unnaturalness, or unreality, of evil.
The fear of being harmed fades as we realize our heritage as the offspring of divine Love. As God’s offspring, His spiritual ideas, we are not vulnerable mortals, but the very expression of God’s being. So we are never separated from the love of divine Love or the perfect direction of infinite Mind.
Abiding each day in the understanding of this comforting, protecting truth, we are able to pray effectively for ourselves and others – including the children in schools, the people at work or at the store, those under threat of destructive weather, and so on. We do our part for humanity by praying to understand the real nature of everyone as children of God, forever abiding under the care of ever-present Love.
Adapted from an article published in the July 2025 issue of The Christian Science Journal.
