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No foxes!
We used to live in a house that had a very long garden with lots of shrubbery at the end of it. One year a fox made a den there and produced five cubs. If we got up very early, we could see them playing, and they were incredibly cute! However, the growing fox population in the town did pose a problem, and residents were asked not to encourage them.
When I moved to a smaller house in another town, I found that my neighbor fed foxes every evening, using little plastic dishes. The foxes would carry their supper under my fence, leave their dishes in my garden, and then drink from my pond. The garden was becoming unsightly and unpleasant to be in, and the problem became quite serious.
I tried talking to my neighbor, but she thought of these furry friends as her family and wasn’t about to stop feeding them. If I blocked the holes under the fence, they would be opened up again. I often prayed about this, as no one had any idea of how to deal with the situation, not even the people at the town council.
When I had to take a trip away for a couple of weeks, I knew I had to keep praying. Before I left, I mentioned my predicament to a friend who happens to be a Christian Science practitioner, to see what her response might be. I didn’t expect the simplicity and directness of her reply: “Put up a large notice saying, No Foxes!”
For a moment I had a funny vision of foxes reading notices. But, despite my smiles, I quickly knew there was a metaphysical concept behind what she was saying. In prayer we deal with everything at the “door of thought” (see Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 392), and that was where I needed to put up the notice. It was a mental checkpoint. If something’s out of balance, or appearing to contaminate the purity and harmony of home—or anything in the orderliness of our lives —saying No Foxes! would be much like saying no to any disruptive elements. I would then be free to recognize the harmony and order of God’s spiritual creation.
I prayed along those lines during my trip. When I got back, I went into the garden to check things out, and was relieved, grateful, and even amazed to find there wasn’t a sign of a fox. There wasn’t a dish in sight, or any evidence of foxes having been there. That was the end of the problem. With the help of a friend, I repaired my fences so that the garden couldn’t become a fox run again, and for all the years I lived there, it remained fox free.
I have often remembered that experience and its lesson—that it’s necessary to say no to any aggressive mental suggestion we might be faced with. When a door in thought is closed to what’s wrong, it remains open to what’s right. In explaining the sanctuary of Spirit, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Closed to error, it is open to Truth, and vice versa” (Science and Health, p. 15). A good, clear notice helps us keep watch at the door.
—Fenella Bennetts, Ripley, Surrey, England