Learning to live globally

A Christian Science perspective on daily life.

As new technologies shrink our world, loving cooperation among peoples and nations becomes more imperative. What happens on the other side of the globe affects us as never before, and vice versa. There is a great need for looking intelligently at this interaction so that all will find a more universal blessing from globalization and not fear it.

A recent story in this newspaper presents some of the problems that demand global cooperation. It begins, "The long trend toward open trade and global markets is under new stress as problems from food shortages to climate change test its staying power" ("As G-8 meets, free trade under fire," July 7). While prayers for our world do not outline specific and political ways to deal with globalization issues, they do enhance our ability to live together peacefully and productively and to find the necessary answers.

Many people from all over the world adhere to the counsel to "love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matt. 19:19). Today the world is becoming one grand neighborhood. This may enlarge the challenges of loving our neighbor as ourselves, but it also enlarges the rewards. We need to keep this in mind as we work through specific problems that only a genuine, unselfish, neighborly love can solve.

"Whatever holds human thought in line with unselfed love, receives directly the divine power," wrote Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of this newspaper ("Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," p. 192). The desire to live globally and peacefully does indeed "hold human thought in line with unselfed love" and lets the power of this love bless universally. We can count on this divine power to "unself" the motives of all engaged in equalizing the benefits of a global economy. The challenge of unemployment in the home country, which results when jobs are shipped to other countries where salaries are lower, must be met intelligently. Certainly there is no real value in merely moving unemployment from one country to another.

The Monitor article cited above also quotes United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon as saying, "Never in recent memory has the global economy been under such stress. More than ever, this is the moment to prove that we can cooperate globally to deliver results: in meeting the needs of the hungry and the poor, in promoting sustainable technologies for all, in saving the world from climate change – and in keeping the global economy growing."

It's obvious that both the developing and developed nations must face these universal problems together. This is not the time when any nation can withdraw into a world of its own. Problems such as climate change affect everyone. It may appear that other issues, such as food shortages, belong more to developing countries. In the long run, all earth's citizens, being neighbors, must work together for the good of all.

Individuals, one by one, are having experiences preparing them to think, pray, and live globally.

Several years ago, a woman toured many countries and four continents with a program on spiritual healing. Through these meetings, often employing interpreters, she learned there were many similarities in the problems these countries were facing. Even more instructive to her were the many times in which she found that the same spiritual truths were used in their prayers for their individual nations, underscoring that there is one God.

The woman states that from that time on she has recognized more keenly the brotherhood of all humanity and the divine power this brotherhood exercises in solving world problems. She feels that what is true in her experience is also true in the lives of people worldwide. We are being prepared to live globally and to give up what might be considered merely selfish personal and national interests.

Growing from "I and my" to "we and our" moves us out of limited living to inhabit a globe of limitless possibilities for all. While this won't be accomplished overnight, our prayers, and not our fears, make universal progress possible.

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