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Right where you are, there is healing
Years back, I held two jobs—managing a Christian Science college housing facility and working full time selling diamonds. Both jobs required my using my car in order to be on time for my jobs.
On Friday mornings, about ten minutes before I needed to leave for work, the garbage truck would arrive. After the men emptied the trash, the bin would be tossed behind my car in the driveway, the space designated for me to park. Leaving notes and talking to the driver asking them to please set the trash can at the side of the drive never helped.
Though I would be fully dressed and ready to go on those days, it fell to me to move the can myself and it was difficult to do without getting dirty. I generally spent the next forty minutes on the way to work, praying to overcome irritation in my thought. This happened weekly for almost a year.
Then one Friday morning as I was finishing a cup of tea at the kitchen window, I heard the truck. From where I was standing, they could not see me. Briefly, I entertained some stray thoughts, then began talking to God.
My first thought was: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 476–477). As I reached out to God in prayer, to know what this meant in my situation, I had a sudden shift in consciousness. I recognized that in certain ways, at least, these men had been expressing unselfishness, humility, dedication, punctuality, and strength as they did their job—human qualities stemming from the men’s true identities as God’s perfect ideas. In praying to see these men in a more spiritual light, my thought changed, and I was able to see them as God had created them. I was able to see through the false appearance of them as inconsiderate and appreciate their Godlike qualities and the good they were doing. Immediately, my arrogance and irritation turned to gratitude and humility. I appreciated how these men showed up, no matter what the weather condition. People could count on them.
Then passages from the Bible where God spoke to Moses came to mind: “And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand” (Exodus 4:2–4).
It occurred to me that this incident had happened primarily in thought—Moses’ thought about what he was seeing, and perhaps fearing, had changed. Then, so had his experience. That’s just what I had done—my thought had gone from seeing the men as material to seeing them as God created them, the perfect expression of divine Love. As these ideas revealed themselves to me, I glanced over, and the man who had emptied the trash was setting the can up on the side of the drive, well away from my car.
A thrill had come from the shift in my thought from arrogance and irritation to appreciation, gratitude, and love. Such love and humility filled my heart as I watched them place my trash can in its proper place—it was the icing on the cake!
I lived there several more years and the bin was always set up by the side of the drive. I cherish realizing that turning to divine Love had resolved the situation.
Becky Barrett-Alford
Wimberly, Texas, US