Article May 16, 1988 Issue

Expectations: great or fearful?

Irene Schanche Bowker

If someone is faced with severe financial, emotional, or physical problems, the world usually understands, even expects, the reaction to be sorrow or fear or dread. Believing they're expected to respond in certain ways to problems, people tend to live up to those expectations. Some believe untoward circumstances are "fate"—possibly foreordained by God. Therefore their reaction may well be resignation or stoic acceptance of pain or disaster. However, someone believing in a good Supreme Being may have difficulty reconciling disaster to the divine scheme of things and may well wonder, "How can God cause or allow evil?"

Christian Science answers, "He neither causes it nor allows it." This divine Science separates evil from God and His creation. It explains that evil actually has no place in God's creation and must therefore be seen as unreal. Fundamentally, evil is a wrong believing—a believing based on testimony obtained from our own concepts, concepts in turn based on the physical senses. But as we turn to God Himself for our understanding we begin to see things quite differently. Christian Science also teaches that man is completely spiritual, wholly good, and inseparable from God. In fact, man is to be learned to be God's perfect image and likeness.

This is not to imply that a Christian Scientist, when confronted with human misery, ignores or unfeelingly turns from it. Rather, he seeks to bring healing to the situation by emulating Christ Jesus, whose compassion surpassed commiseration and helped people find healing through divine Love. Jesus helped mankind raise its expectations of life—from sickness to health, from sin to perfection, from death to life, and this is our goal as well.

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