The clear view and the distorted view

When we look through a foggy pane of glass, the view is distorted and unclear.

When we look through a crystal clear piece of glass, the view is clean and precise.

A material point of view is a distorted view. A spiritual view is a plain view.

Divine Science is a clear pane of glass. Physical sense is a cloudy pane of glass.

What pane are you looking through today?

Making better choices

I watched a one-minute lesson on the Tennis Channel last night delivered by a sports psychologist. He was pointing out the importance of not letting negative emotions take over one's thinking while playing tennis.


As he noted, if you hit a shot poorly and react with, “Oh bummers, what a disappointment,” your attitude sags, your body sags, and your next shot suffers even more. How well you think determines how well you play.


He further explained that the polished pros don’t let negative attitudes take over their thinking. They stay positive, look for the improvement to make and stay up.


It was a valuable reminder that thinking governs our game. Our game does not govern our thinking.


I applied the direction to the larger lessons of life.


What happens around us does not determine our state of mind. What we choose to believe and accept determines our perspective.


For instance, if a rude driver cuts in front of us on the highway, we are not obligated to get upset. That’s a choice we make. If an employee fails to follow through with an assignment, we are not required to fuss and fume all day. That’s a choice we make. If we run short of funds before our next paycheck arrives, we are not under pressure to panic. That’s a choice we make.


Likely, we all have opportunities to make better choices!


What the material senses see and hear does not determine what we think. What we think determines how we react and respond to what we see and hear.


When our thinking is informed by spiritual truth, we make better choices.

So, today, I’m going to practice listening better to God first when faced with challenges, and draw a spiritual conclusion about what I see and hear rather than be tempted to react out of fear or worry. It should improve my “game” of life immensely! How about you?

What in the world is going on?

As I walked down our long driveway to get the newspaper this morning, I thought, “I wonder what is happening in the world today?” With steep stock market declines, bank failures, shrinking GDPs around the world, war in the Far East, and other calamities facing humanity, a major headline of distress seems to hit the headlines about everyday.

Rather than anticipating a new disaster to mull over, I quickly reversed the curious thought and declared, “I know exactly what is happening in the world today! God is in control supplying solutions, providing answers, solving problems and restoring health to troubled nations and peoples around the globe.

It felt so much better to affirm the positive than to stay burdened by the negative.

The human mind lives out what it perceives to be reality. Whether justified or not, if individual thought is embroiled in fear of lack, worry about loss, and fascination with every proclamation of doom broadcast over the media, it is likely to be overwhelmed by a sense of lack, loss and doom. It could start living out those dark impressions of mortal mind, and this is not necessary.

God is an ever-present help in any time of trouble. Christ is always at work in human consciousness supplying wisdom, insight, guidance and direction that enables one to overcome struggle and demonstrate success.

The purpose of prayer is to open thought to Christ’s presence and let God’s help be revealed.

However, if we let mortal mind capture our attention with prophecies of doom and gloom, we aren’t listening to God. We are not praying. Mental absorption into negative news takes thought into a foreign land of loneliness, despair and discouragement. It is not a helpful perspective to hold on to. It’s destructive mesmerism, and it needs to be reversed with conscientious and meaningful prayer.

So, as I meandered down the rest of the driveway to the paper box, I decided not to wait until I read the headlines to decide what was happening in the world today. I was not looking forward to reading more depressing news. I was going to know ahead of time what was spiritually true about the world I lived in before I read the paper!

This type of positive expectancy felt so much better…

What do you expect to find in the world today?

A quiet mind

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted.
Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.

~ Hans Margolius

I like the above quote because it reminds me of what happens when we put Christian Science into practice.

From a material point of view, the universe looks chaotic, disordered, diseased, and rife with death. The human mind, absorbed by the material evidence, likewise feels chaotic, disordered, diseased, and subject to death.

But adopt a spiritual perspective of the universe, the "kingdom of heaven at hand" that Jesus Christ preached, and the disturbances in the human mind begin to calm and disappear. Quiet takes over. And when quieted by spiritual truth, the human mind becomes as a mirror for what is real in Spirit.

A "quiet mind" is not a dormant mind, but a spiritually peaceful consciousness of Truth and Love. In this divine consciousness, spiritual reality appears, and the world is seen correctly, from the point of view that God created it in the first place--as wholly good.

And that's a wonderful place to be.

How perceptive are you?

My wife and I needed to replace the wood stove on the lower level of our cabin in the Blue Mountains this year for it has become a safety hazard. So, last Tuesday we visited a stove store in Elgin, Oregon, to buy a replacement, and we learned the most fascinating information about what the trained eye can perceive that the untrained eye ignores.

The man who does the work was not in, but his wife greeted us and was a most gracious and a knowledgeable help.

She asked us several questions about the condition and state of our chimney to determine how much work needed to be done before the new stove could be installed. We were clueless on how to answer most of her questions, and began to wonder how many delays would transpire before the replacement could be made.

Then I brought out several pictures my wife had taken of the stove and its chimney. The woman looked at the pictures and pulled out one snapshot of the metal caps on top of the roof. The picture showed very little and looked quite meaningless to the casual eye, but she exclaimed, “Oh, Grant can figure out all the answers to our questions by looking at this picture.”

She explained that her husband could tell the age of the chimney, the quality of the piping, whether it needed to be swept or not from seeing that 6’ cap on top of the A-frame. Our jaws went a gap. I awed at how much knowledge an experienced eye could gain from such a small piece of evidence.

Then she blurted, “Maybe he knows your chimney already! Is your cabin located in a visible place from a main road?” And she further explained that he notices everyone’s chimney while driving to and from jobs. It was his work, “To know chimneys!” And we awed a bit more.

“Of course,” I later thought. “This man knows chimneys like a pianist knows the keys on a keyboard. He understands and finds meaning in minute details that the average person takes for granted.”

In seeking a spiritual lesson from this conversational exchange, I decided that we all should be just as observant of God’s presence at work in our environment as this chimney-sweep was of his neighbor’s stove-pipes. He needed to see only a few inches of evidence to deduce a huge sum of information not visible to the naked eye.

Do you notice your neighbor’s chimneys? Probably not, if it’s not your business to know chimneys.

But more importantly, do you notice your neighbor’s full blown God-given spiritual selfhood, even when it’s not obvious?

A simple good deed, a little smile, a kind gesture, a steadfast presence, is the “few inches of evidence” that indicate a much greater and grander spirituality underneath that is not always apparent to the naked eye because there are so many other things that would distract our attention.

But if we’re willing to look into the details, to study existence closely, we’ll find evidence of good where good doesn’t seem to exist because we aren’t paying attention.

I’ve learned through this that we mustn’t drive on through life ignoring the obvious. Signs of God’s presence are everywhere, but sometimes only noticeable in the smallest of details. Like the chimney-sweep trained to know chimneys inside and out, we can be a God-sweep, trained to know God’s wonderful creation inside and out from whatever vantage point we’re sitting.

Enjoy the view!

Point of view

If earth were a crystal ball

With naked eye we'd pierce it thru

To find the sun is always up--

The down is just our point of view!

~ Mildred Hoskinson