Relationships That Don't Break Down
MOST relationships have ups and downs. Sometimes differences arise that seem irreconcilable. We may even feel that it's easier to give up. But in our hearts we yearn for healing. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, comments in Retrospection and Introspection, ``There are no greater miracles known to earth than perfection and an unbroken friendship.'' Relationships that remain happy and supportive over a long period, even a lifetime, we value more than any posession. Such sturdy relationships don't just ``happen.'' They are the result of hard work, sacrifice, and, often, a great deal of prayer. When major misunderstandings and the merciless frictions of the world wear upon a relationship, what can keep people working together? Only a love that's more than a personal love. We need a glimpse of God's love.
God's infinite love can restore human relationships and correct whatever is wrong if people are willing to commit themselves to growing spiritually. It takes spiritual determination to turn to God and let only divine Love influence us. It takes getting still enough to feel the presence of divine Love and hear what God is saying to us. Then the realness of God's love dawns on us. God's strength and peace encompass us and reach the relationships we're praying to heal.
Christ Jesus expressed -- through his every word and ac-tion -- the divine Love that knows no mistake, weakness, or alienation. Jesus knew that he was God's loved Son and that his relationship to God could never be broken. No matter how abused or misrepresented, Jesus never stopped loving and bearing witness to man's inherent spirituality. He knew that man's real identity is the offspring of God -- the spiritual likeness of divine Love, inseparable from Love. This enabled him to heal disease and sin and be victorious over death on the cross.
Christian healing and salvation are really a matter of being reconciled to God -- having our thoughts and actions brought into a right relationship to divine Truth and Love. And this takes some yielding! ``Even Christ cannot reconcile Truth to error, for Truth and error are irreconcilable,'' Mrs. Eddy points out in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. But then she goes on to explain the basis of Christianity's redeeming power: ``Jesus aided in reconciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love, the divine Principle of Jesus' teachings, and this truer sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter, sin, and death by the law of Spirit, -- the law of divine Love.''
The ``truer sense of Love'' Jesus gave us reveals the Christ -- the saving, redeeming Truth which shows us our oneness with God and makes it perfectly natural for us to see a more Christly way, and to act on it.
When our relationship to God is strongly in view, our other relationships are improved and strengthened. Our relationship to God is the relationship we should never neglect and should care about and honor above all.
Divine Love operates as universal law, governing all. It never gets tired. Divine Love is the eternal source of all love, and so real love can never stop or be finished. No one can be divorced from it or be outside of it. Catching this truer sense of Love brings us together. It reconciles and heals.
This is a condensed version of an editorial that appeared in the October 8 issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
