Perspective and summer movies
I love the summer movie season. The excitement. The inspiration. You step out of the movie theater in mid-evening to find the sun still up and the temperature down to just where you like it.
It reminds me of being a kid and out of school for the summer. I was free of worries, free from demands. Free to think about life. What was I going to do when I grew up? What really was important to me?
I forget how many summer movies I saw last time around. But I do remember which one was my favorite: "Tarzan." The music was great, and the first line of one song particularly caught my attention: "Put your faith in what you most believe in ...." That stayed with me.
Driving home that evening, I felt a little reminder of what my purpose was in life. It wasn't so much punching in and out at work or rushing around getting errands done. I thought: "Life is a wave of inspiration that needs to be ridden. And we stay on the crest of that wave by 'putting our faith in what we most believe in.' "
On the surface, my day or week is a lot of work at the office and around the house - not to mention the errands that have me out fighting traffic. But my moments of reflection, or prayer, tell me there's a greater purpose in all of this, and a great spiritual force - a Principle - that transcends life as we so often see it. That Principle is God, who is the source of all life and activity. Everyone expresses God in his or her own way. The activity of seeing God's spiritual qualities expressed around us is what I see as being our real purpose in life.
Each one of us reveals, individually, spiritual qualities such as vitality, joy, peace, and intelligence. Our focus on these qualities, and on our ability to express them, brings new inspiration and fulfillment. It brings a much different perspective - a whole different feeling and experience. We're bringing the awareness of God's presence to the front of our consciousness and seeing just how it is that He is all around us.
This literally transforms our lives. Stress, angst, and haste get pushed aside. They begin to disappear as we begin to recognize ways that God's great goodness is coming forward in our lives. We're putting our faith, our focus of thought, in good, and coming to find that good is "what we most believe in"!
Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, once wrote: "As vapor melts before the sun, so evil would vanish before the reality of good. One must hide the other. How important, then, to choose good as the reality!" ("Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," pgs. 480-481) The premise of her founding of this newspaper was to help make the triumph of good over evil more apparent. We have to be aware of what needs healing in the world; then, in an effort to promote healing, we need to bring to the front of human consciousness peace instead of anxiety, health instead of illness, joy instead of sorrow, love instead of hate. This is believing in good and putting all faith in it.
Recently, a third party put a business associate and me in an awkward position. Things got hostile, and I was getting nowhere with talking to either person. I soon realized that my business associate, in particular, had been placed in a difficult position. Getting angry with her would have solved nothing.
But what I could do was pray to see that spiritual qualities from God - such as peace, respect, and understanding - were present in our lives right then. I put my faith in the fact that God is All and is good. That the power of God was present to overpower the tension and hostility, which it quickly did.
Once again, I found a little clarification of my life-purpose. It's to see good triumph over evil, even if only in small steps. That's worth so much more than any mere business transaction.
Articles like this one appear in 13 different languages in the magazine The Herald of Christian Science.
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society
