The illusion of debt

While studying the story of the widow woman and her pot of oil in the Christian Science Bible lesson this week, a new insight into the unreality of debt grabbed my attention.

In the story, a woman’s husband dies leaving behind a huge debt for his wife. She has no money to pay. The creditors are ready to seize her two sons as bondmen. She appeals to the prophet Elisha for help, and per Elisha’s instructions, she pays off the debt in what appeared a miraculous way—her small pot of oil multiplying into many large pots of oil.

I asked myself, “What did Elisha see spiritually that enabled him to see the unreality of that debt?”

Just like a spiritual healer does not see disease as a reality, a prophet would not see debt as a reality either. “How is this?” I pondered.

And I got my answer. If I may ramble a bit…

Debt is not real, because everything a person thinks he gets from debt is not real either. It’s temporal.

My definition of “real,” is that which lasts forever. Only the spiritual lasts forever. Love, wisdom, genuine family ties, home, peace of mind, health, reliable supply, support, joy, and their kin, are spiritual. They come from divine Mind and last forever in divine Mind.

Debt comes from telling someone you’ll pay them money later if they give you something today.

What does debt purchase? Not anything real. It purchases things, stuff, matter-items, human services, and conditions of the temporal world. It does not purchase anything that comes from God.

The supply of God is freely bestowed. It comes in a spiritual form, and is a gift to all of us. We don’t need money to have love, home, peace of mind, health, and so on. These are all gifts of God and found in Mind, not in matter.

Back to the widow woman…

So, I thought, when the widow woman told Elisha she had no money, or in essence, she had no supply, Elisha knew her statement was wrong. Elisha knew the woman was entertaining an illusion about her supply condition. She really did have supply, because God was the source of her supply, and God supplies each of us abundantly, so her supply was present in her home. Elisha knew this. She just didn't see it.

It seemed to me that the woman was entertaining her dead husband’s illusion that he had to go into debt to have supply for his family. And he went into debt because he had not grown to a very wealthy understanding of supply yet. He saw his supply as being material, and turned to material providers for it, thus strapping his family with a limited sense of supply.

Elisha knew better. Elisha knew that no real supply comes from worldly creditors. It comes from God in a spiritual form, and he knew that this woman’s family had always been supplied by God. The family had never been truly supplied by the things purchased with debt. Any effect from increased things is temporal, and leaves one feeling empty-handed eventually, which is what happened to the widow.

The love, joy, health, nourishment, sustenance, freedom and life of that family were spiritual and always had been. They were coming from God and hadn’t gone anywhere.

The husband’s passing did not take the family's supply away from them. God was supplying that family with love, health, freedom, support, and protection after the husband’s passing just as much as before. Nothing had changed between them and God. The widow needed to drop her husband’s limited sense of supply in order to see the unreality of the debt.

Whoa…I was getting quite psyched to consider the implications of this insight…

So, that means right where the woman saw debt, Elisha saw supply. He did not believe the woman when she said she couldn’t pay her debt. He reasoned spiritually that her belief of debt was impossible. She was not in debt to the world for her supply. She was in debt to God, and God was supplying her as always.

Her belief of a matter-debt to the world for the supply-needs of her family was pure illusion. She never was in debt to the world and never could be for the real needs of her family were spiritual, and supplied only by God. She had been hypnotized by a false belief concerning supply. She was not in material debt at all to the world because the world could not give her anything that God was not already giving her, and it never had. In reality, she was swimming in supply. And Elisha knew it.

Elisha asked the woman, “What do you have in your house?” As if he knew she had to have evidence of supply in her life. And she replied that she had nothing in the house except a pot of oil.

You probably know the rest of the story. She poured the little pot out into several large pots, and oil kept flowing and flowing and flowing until there was more than enough oil to sell and pay all her bills, with funds left over.

The debt was illusion. What appeared to exist from a limited material sense, did not exist at all from a spiritually enlightened point of view. Supply was the reality, and Elisha scientifically proved it.

We can prove it too.

None of us are in debt to the world for the real supply-items of Life. God is the supplier, and it doesn't cost a single dollar to have what the divine Provider gives. And that is enough.

How big is your God?

A reader sent me these pictures today.

Can you find spiritual lessons in them?

The first question I asked was, “Can humans hold the sun in their hands?”

The answer is obviously “No,” but the picture tells a different story.

I thought about other examples where the lesser appears to master and control the greater.

For example, there is much talk in the press today about recessionary conditions in the US economy. It would appear that the sub-prime fall-out, the high price of oil, and expense of war in Iraq are sapping our livelihood and lowering our standard of living. If we were to buy into this summary, our demonstration of supply might feel gripped within the ever tightening hands of fear, and belief of shortage and lack.

But if we understand our supply is not human, not material, and not temporal at the mercy of fear-cycles, we can have supply despite a recession. The greater is never at the mercy of the lesser.

We have to back away from what appears to be a shrinking, small amount of supply, and regain the correct picture of God as infinite supply, and bigger than any quantity the human mind can comprehend.

From a material point of view resources might appear limited, small and meager, like the little sun in the big fingers. But from a divine vantage point of God as the source of all supply, resources are infinite, unending and ever flowing.

We must not be deceived by the human picture!

You might have your own examples to share of the lesser trying to limit the greater…

“Mortal man has made a covenant with his eyes to belittle Deity with human conceptions. In league with material sense, mortals take limited views of all things.” Mary Baker Eddy