Fresh opportunities

DO you sometimes feel that you are tied to a treadmill of inexorable routine in the same place with the same people around you, doing the same tasks every day with no apparent prospect of change or progress? Or have you perhaps tried moving to a different place with different people, only to find the same conditions all over again? Did you begin to realize then that it was really your own thought about the place and the people which was limited and which needed to change and expand, and that there are always unlimited opportunities to accomplish this? What's needed isn't just more human reasoning and analyzing but completely fresh thinking--spiritual perceptiveness --which helps us to see the promise and potential in everybody and in everything worthwhile.

Opportunity doesn't truly depend on people and places, however much it may seem to do so. And it isn't a product of chance that comes to some people and not to others. Each of us has the opportunity, at any time, to express God's nature more fully and to look to divine law to supply the appropriate channels for that expression in our lives. Christ Jesus' teachings and healing ministry clearly point to this truth.

A woman once said imperturbably when she was doing what seemed very menial work for a person of her capabilities, ``No matter what my hands are doing, I can still think!'' And very soon fresh opportunities did open up for her to use her hands more effectively. This was quite a new way of looking at things for me at that time, but I have often remembered it since and have acted from that standpoint myself with gratifying results. I began to understand better the very practical effect that thought has in any situation.

But what kind of thinking did she mean? Just daydreaming to offset monotony doesn't do anything to help. How could she find her thoughts so powerful? And where do such thoughts come from? The prophet wrote: ``My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.''1

We find fresh opportunities as we're receptive to God's thoughts, to His pure ideas. And this is natural, for our true being, as the Bible teaches, is the likeness of God, the expression of the one infinite Mind. Man as God made him isn't a material personality with a limited, material mind. He's not dependent on the human brain to originate and govern his thoughts.

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes: ``God's thoughts are perfect and eternal, are substance and Life. Material and temporal thoughts are human, involving error, and since God, Spirit, is the only cause, they lack a divine cause.''2 And she says elsewhere: ``Progress is born of experience. It is the ripening of mortal man, through which the mortal is dropped for the immortal.''3

As we're receptive to God and His pure thoughts, we'll be dropping the mortal for the immortal and opening the way for progress. So what looks to us like a good opportunity in material terms can really be the progressive result of inspired thought taking expression in human experience and opening up more of the good that is already and always available. And there's no limit to the number or variety of inspired thoughts, to the one divine Mind that originates them, or to the fresh opportunities that they present.

1Isaiah 55:8, 9. 2Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 286. 3Ibid., p. 296. You can find more articles like this one in the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine. DAILY BIBLE VERSE Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. I Corinthians 2:9