Victim of Lies? Truth Can Save You

I WAS young. It was my first job. I couldn't have been happier. Then one payday there was a pink slip in my envelope. I was fired. No reason had been given. I was devastated.

My family had become interested in Christian Science. We were just beginning to learn that the nature of God, understood, has a healing effect on people's lives. This means that there are solutions for everyday challenges. I was learning that God is Mind, the Maker of everything, and only the Maker of good. The man He created, (you, me, and everyone) is spiritual and, as a result, flawless and invulnerable. Because God is All, whatever is not good is non- existent. Injustice has to be like the zero, the hole in the doughnut, which seems to be something but is not.

What I was learning about God encouraged me to pray in response to being let go. To pray means to seek to understand and love the truth of God and man, and to silence any arguments against God's oneness and power with the recognition that reality is spiritual. Acknowledging the presence of God and His Christ dissolves fears and shows the reality of peace and harmony.

I was discovering that when one understands even a little bit of the truth of spiritual reality, good happens. At that moment--in tears, with the door of my room shut--I did not see this clearly. But one of my parents did, and the certainty of that prayer brought an unexpected turn of events. A friend who had known me most of my life felt impelled to go to the firm where I had been employed. She asked why I had been let go. To her astonishment, she heard an utter falsity about me, a completely untrue allegation. She knew the facts of the situation and was quickly able to correct the lie. A telephone call from my employer reinstated me at once.

What I learned about the power of God, divine Truth, from this experience helped me grow up in more ways than one. I had glimpsed the spiritual fact that evil is not a person. Forgiveness was natural when I understood this. But I learned even more. I learned that evil, a lie, has no truth at all in God's universe, the only reality. God never made a lie, or a liar.

Christ Jesus was convicted and crucified because of lies about him that were believed and acted upon. But the resurrection came from the power of Truth! If we believe we are hurt, or the victim of injustice, we should remember the Saviour. The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, writes of Christ Jesus in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: ``He did life's work aright not only in justice to himself, but in mercy to mortals,--to show them how to do theirs, but not to do it for them nor to relieve them of a single responsibility'' (p. 18).

Think of what Jeremiah must have felt when his friends rescued him. Jeremiah was in a hole, literally. It was a dungeon so deep he couldn't climb out. Enemies had told lies about him and gotten him thrown into the dungeon. He would have starved but for Ebedmelech, a servant of the king. He persuaded King Zedekiah to let him get Jeremiah out. And the king gave him thirty men to help. The Bible tells us, ``They drew up Jeremiah with cords, and took him up out of the dungeon'' (38:13). Jeremiah was saved.

Christly compassion, unselfishness, and integrity have their origin in God. Expressing such God-derived qualities not only saves others, as Jeremiah was saved by Ebedmelech, it blesses us as well. The Bible goes on to record God's promise to Ebedmelech: ``I will surely deliver thee...: because thou hast put thy trust in me'' (Jeremiah 39:18).

Working to live as a representative of Truth, God, naturally improves conditions. The presence of God, for instance, no longer seems like a mere ethereal surmise. We feel its reality. Joy becomes deeper than any pits of materiality and lifts us above and beyond a miry mentality. Best of all, when Truth comes to the rescue, everyone is free to enjoy God's goodness and peace and to see the practicality of His salvation.