It was a dream come true. As soon as my husband and I retired, we moved to our canal boat in France. We’d worked hard and waited a long time for this, envisioning a peaceful life afloat on quiet, lazy canals. But things weren’t working out quite as expected.

Our boat was moored in a marina with about three feet between each boat. Every night I was awakened many times by a neighbor’s cuckoo clock striking just a few feet away. It struck all day and all night, and what was particularly disturbing is that the sound came at odd times, never on the hour or the half-hour. It was jarring, never knowing when the clock would strike. 

Living so close to neighbors meant we needed to be accepting and forgiving, but after a couple of weeks I told my husband I was out of patience. That cuckoo clock was annoying, and I would have to say something about it to our neighbors a few boat slips away. After all, I’d been awake most of the night. “I’ll be polite,” I assured him, but I wondered why they’d been so selfish, so uncaring. It occurred to me that we could never be friends with people who were not thoughtful of their neighbors.

I made my way down the bobbing pontoon to the slip from where the cuckoo sound had been coming. There was no boat there. “What a relief!” I thought. But just then, as if on cue, I heard the cuckoo. Looking up, I saw an overhanging tree, and in it was perched a cuckoo! It had never crossed my mind that the noisemaker might be a real, live cuckoo. I’d gotten upset and angry at nothing.

The mystery was solved, and I had to laugh. But the episode made me ponder something I’d learned in Christian Science—that we experience what we believe. I’d believed there was a clock cuckooing all day and night, and I’d even been provoked to take action on what I believed—on a false assumption. I had to admit that wasn’t the first time I’d based my thoughts and actions on something that simply wasn’t true.

Once when I was rummaging around in a dark basement, I was bitten by a black widow spider. As the minutes passed, I began to experience the symptoms I had heard would follow a poisonous spider bite. I soon found myself unable to continue the work I was doing, and tucked myself into bed.

I realized it was up to me to define my own experience.

I didn’t have my Bible nearby, or my copy of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, the textbook of Christian Science that teaches us how to heal the way Jesus did. I certainly needed healing at that moment, but I didn’t even have the strength to get those books and read the comforting, instructive words. I got on my mental knees and prayed to hear the healing idea that would meet this situation. I was alone in the house, so I especially needed to calm my fear.

Since I’d been in the basement to pack for a move, there were boxes all around the house, and the one that happened to be next to the bed was a strong and perfect packing box with an advertising slogan on its side, “Define your style.” That made me ask myself, What is my style? Is it fear or freedom?

I realized it was up to me to define my own experience. I reasoned that if I experience what I believe, then I’d better believe only true facts about the universe in which I live. I began to list facts of spiritual reality:

1. There is one God.

2. God is good.

3. I am a reflection of that good.

4. Right here, right now, God, good, is present.

The statements sounded so basic, and I’d probably learned these concepts early on in my study of Christian Science, but I was sure they were true. As a child, I had also learned that, as Mary Baker Eddy writes, “All nature teaches God’s love to man …” (Science and Health, p. 326). I reasoned that if I had a lesson to learn from this experience, it was probably that spiders and I were all creations of God, coexisting peacefully in God’s kingdom, and that I could depend on good being the only outcome possible. I was defining my style, which was to depend on God, divine Love, and to know no fear.

Mrs. Eddy writes, “Whatever inspires with wisdom, Truth, or Love—be it song, sermon, or Science—blesses the human family with crumbs of comfort from Christ’s table …” (Science and Health, p. 234). I never thought a box was where I would find the inspiration to begin to turn wholeheartedly to God for healing, but that’s exactly what happened.

As with the cuckoo clock, I’d learned that if I had the true spiritual facts, my actions would be in harmony with my surroundings. And I knew that in God’s harmonious kingdom, I could experience only harmony. Within an hour or so, I was feeling fine and went back to the packing—but I took a break to cut up that box and save the slogan to remind me that God is right there, no matter what. I keep it in a frame on my bedside table.