"When it happens to you…"

"And though my heart is torn,
I will praise you in this storm..."

It's no secret that I love the inspired music ministry of Casting Crowns. Their recently released "Thrive" CD is a favorite. Earlier this week their lead singer, Mark Hall, was given an unsettling diagnosis and faces surgery soon. The Casting Crowns family has reached out to their church and fan community for support through prayer. It is a privilege to join them in this way.

In a moving post written for the band's website by Mark's wife, Melanie asks,"When it happens to you, where do you turn?"  And the band offers their beautiful song, "Praise You in the Storm" as inspiration and encouragement. Both Melanie's post and the song moved me deeply.

The first paragraph of Melanie's piece reads: "The call on your cell phone from the doctor with bad news -- that's something that happens to other people, not to us. Our role, for the last 25 years in ministry, is to be there to encourage other people after the call, and to pray with them and try to bring comfort. So when it happens to you, where do you turn?"

Melanie goes on to say, "Mark and I seemed to be in a bit of a fog for several days while the news was sinking in.
Yet the whole time, the verse that kept running through my head over and over was:

"You will keep in perfect peace
him whose mind is steadfast,
because he trusts in You."
-Isaiah 26:3. 

Yes. This is exactly where we turn. We turn to Scripture which floods our hearts with the Word. We rest our thoughts on these promises -- like life rafts in a roiling sea of "what if…" And as Mary Baker Eddy encourages in her primary work on hope and healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, we:

"cling steadfastly to God,
and His idea, allowing nothing
but His likeness
to abide in our thought..." 

And then, we return to the Word - again, and again - for Love's timeless encouragement in stories of salvation, parables of promise, reminders of redemption and resurrection, and messages of healing.

And we are each writing new gospel stories of deep spiritual trust in our lives every day. These contemporary testaments of faith encourage others to remember that, as Mark sings, "You [God] are with us…" At times when we might feel as though we are alone in the storm, we can turn to one another for affirmation, and to the Bible for unshakeable precedent-setting cases of God's law in operation -- even in the storm.

At a particularly challenging time in my own life it was Jesus' parable of the house built on the sand that pulled me out of a death spiral of despair. I've already referred to this experience in an earlier post (linked here) titled,""I will give you perfect peace..." As well as in in another post, "A house that will not fall..." whick is linked at the end of that piece. And because of this personal storm, a parable now lives as part of me -- it is no longer "just a parable" -- it is what courses through my being as vitally as air and water.

The alarming "call" can come in countless forms -- disappointing test results, an upsetting report card, a lost job opportunity, a rejection letter, a health crisis, alarming global events, a child's cry in the night...

So, where do we turn -- we turn to Him, we turn to His Word, we turn to one another for encouragement. Our stories of hope and healing are critical to our neighbors and friends. Our testimonies of deep spiritual trust are vital to the body of Christ, in which we share fellowship in faith. And this is where we hear another call -- the call of Spirit urging us to turn to God, to look through the lens of His love. For it is here that, "He saw everything that He had made, and behold it was -- and is -- very good."

We are not alone in the storm. We are never alone. We have the still small Voice of God. We have the Word. We have the Gospel message of "the kingdom of God is within you." We have angels that hover in the stillness.  And we have each other. Our Father-Mother God is with us -- always. He will keep us in perfect peace.


offered with Love,

Kate

"Never vulnerable..."

"I've got the power..."

Actually, I don't have the power.   In fact, I don't have any power...of my own.  As Jesus said, "I can, of mine own self, do nothing..."  Nada. Niks. Non, Niet.

There is something so freeing in knowing that I don't have the power, and never will. I get to stop trying to have -- or ever even get -- it.

But, God does. God has all the power, I just get to "see" what He is doing. This little clip from the film, "Bruce Almighty," is a fun little hint of how "kick ass" it feels to know that -- as the very expression of God's being -- we may be powerless, but we are not, and never will be, vulnerable.

We get to act with courage, confidence, humility, and grace. We walk with a skip in our step and joy in our hearts.

As part of our church's healing ministry, the online version of its weekly magazine, The Christian Science Sentinel, asked readers to respond to this question:

"How have you prayed
when confronted with either news of,
or an experience with,
contagion or seasonal illness?

As I sat in front of the screen this morning, thinking about how I might respond, I couldn't help but think of an experience when I felt so confronted. Here was my response:

For me, this is not a matter of my "being confronted with the news, or an experience with, contagion or seasonal illness," but of it being confronted by the Christ consciousness that I represent as a child of God, an expression of Mind.

First, error never exposes itself willingly to the Truth. Mary Baker Eddy, in her article "Ways that are Vain," counsels us to remember that,

"All error asks is to be left alone."

It is the Christ in consciousness that brings error -- the belief that God is, or could ever be, absent -- out into the open.   And it is this very same Christ, in consciousness, that is, therefore, already present to eradicate it -- much as light eradicates darkness.  It is effortless and immediate, without medium -- of process, or human thought-taking.

This was a critical realization for me when facing a terrifying diagnosis and the constant barrage of media information (and images) of this particular illness.

One day, while standing in line at the grocery store, I found myself looking at a magazine where the symptoms on my body were being mirrored in an article about "How to detect...."

I was terrified. I felt that I had been exposed to a visual confirmation of the symptoms I was facing. And according to this article, it wasn't good.

I ran from the market and hurried home to where I felt I had the best chance of dealing with it all. Not only the images I had been confronted with, but now the fear they had exacerbated.

But, a testimony I discovered, in the print version of this same publication, helped me see that I had not been exposed to powerful negative information and images, but that it had been exposed to me -- to the light of my conscious relationship with God, with Mind. Silly error. It had puffed itself up into such a state of self-delusion that it was exposed to ME -- me, the manifestation of God as Mind, as Truth, Life and Love. It was "going down."

Suddenly, I had this "bring it" sense of spiritual self-certainty about what really had power...and it wasn't error. It was the Truth of spiritual being. The All-in-allness of God's powerful love for His creation.

This is a much longer story...but suffice it to say that within weeks, the symptoms, and their claims upon my body, dissolved in the sunlight of this Truth about what really has power and presence.

We are never victims of error. We are never vulnerable mortals. We are never fragile minds, never spongelike in our porousness, never open to the absorption of flat-out lies concerning God's good-sustaining power to maintain the integrity of our wholeness...our health, wellness, and perfection.

We are the very expression, the very-present evidence of the power and presence of divinity, expressed as humanity. We are not sentient. We are not passive beings just waiting to be stimulated by outside information, or experiences, that we then need to react (or respond) to spiritually. We are spiritually radiant. So radiant in fact, that the darkness of error cannot even come close to reaching any of us.

Where there is consciousness, there is Mind -- God. And where there is God, there is the power and presence of good....only. Impartially, universally, imperatively.

offered today, with Love...

Kate

[photo credit: Lila June Jones]