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Prayer on the job
I was recently reading the first volume of the expanded edition of We Knew Mary Baker Eddy. John Salchow, a worker in Mrs. Eddy’s household, writes in his reminiscence about “learning to reverse the belief that a thing could not be done” (p. 394). This idea inspired me, and I immediately realized that it could apply to my work, too. I work in the technology services group at The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and began praying with this idea for all the computer issues in my queue.
In particular, we had been receiving calls about some reporting software returning error messages. I had the primary responsibility to solve the issue, since it occurred on a system I administer. A co-worker and I looked at the issue together, but no solution came—so I entered a ticket with the software vendor. I worked with the vendor for more than two months to find an answer, but still there didn’t seem to be much progress. I was not able to discern a pattern as to when the error messages occurred and when the reports worked.
That’s when I read John Salchow’s reminiscence and realized I could apply the idea to “reverse the belief that a thing could not be done.” With this in mind, I refused to accept that this problem could not be solved. As I prayed with this idea, it came to me to ask my co-worker if we could look at the issue together one more time. Over several hours of work, it became clearer what the problem was and what needed to be changed. But at this point, we could not figure out exactly where in the software to implement the solution. I began praying with the idea that nothing could be hidden from us—we could see any adjustments that needed to be made. Because God is divine Mind and we are the very expression of God’s intelligence, ideas couldn’t be hidden or shielded from us.
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