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Right where we needed to be
As a lifelong Christian Scientist, I have had many proofs of God’s goodness, love, and kindness. Father-Mother God loves all His children, and a recent experience showed that fact to me very clearly.
I am a Christian Science nurse, and a fellow Christian Science nurse and I were out riding our bikes after work. I asked him if he wanted to learn how to Geocache. (Geocaching is a kind of hi-tech scavenger hunt where people hide “caches,” or small containers, sometimes with messages or fun items inside, and log the coordinates so people can search for them and find them using a smartphone app.) My friend agreed to learn, so we went to the coordinates of a nearby cache, hunted around for a bit, and found it. We then went looking for another one. This one was off the paved bike path, and we followed a rough, narrow dirt trace around the edge of a lake. We got close, dropped our bikes, and began looking.
The area was very brushy, and there was no clear view of anything. We were looking for a small cylinder about six inches in size. After thrashing around through the foliage for a while, I noticed something that looked like a paper bag behind a rather large bush, close to the lake. I asked my friend, “Is that a paper bag?”
We both looked again, and this time it looked like a person all huddled up. I whispered to my companion, “I think that’s a person.” At that point the person, a young woman, burst into tears.
My friend and I looked at each other and went down to her. She was crying so hard that she wasn’t very coherent, but the words “cancer” and “no money” came through. We couldn’t tell if she was talking about herself, or someone she loved, but I hugged her and we proceeded to get her calmed down a bit. She told us she had come down to the lake to pray and that she felt God was punishing her and that He hated her. Well, that is not something to say in front of two Christian Science nurses! So we immediately refuted those false concepts about God. We told her God loved her, that she was loved and loving and lovable. We told her that God loves all His children. Simple truths, but effective.
We stayed with her for about half an hour and got her calmed down enough to smile and laugh a bit. We also gave her some snacks we had and about $10.00. As we all got ready to leave, she reached back in the bushes for her shoes. It was then I noticed that there was a pen and some folded paper at her bare feet. Had she come with thoughts of suicide, prepared to leave a note behind? I didn’t ask and she didn’t say, but I suddenly was very grateful that God had led my friend and me to the very spot where the woman was, right when she needed to hear that God loved her.
We told her that God loves all His children.
As my friend and I biked away, we both were very silent. My fellow Christian Science nurse turned to me when we got back to the main path and said, “We didn’t find that last cache, but we found the treasure.” To me, the treasure was a lesson for all of us—the young woman was shown that she was indeed a treasure in God’s eyes, and my friend and I got the treasure of applying Christian Science as we helped someone in need.
Later on that night I stayed awake, praying and handling in my own thought the concepts of fear, homelessness, and especially the false belief that suicide was a way to escape heavy burdens. I am so glad that my friend and I were receptive to God’s directions, that we got “self” out of the way, and that we were able to show a young stranger something of God’s love.