Depression Cannot Retard Unfoldment

HERSCHEL P. NUNN

"O MAN greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee, be strong, yea, be strong." We are beloved of our Father. He supplies our ability to reflect His law. His love for us is expressed by us when we are actively about our Father's business. For us to be inactive, unemployed, would therefore not be God's will or desire.

The conscious lack of any needed thing, work, position, poise, contentment, friendship, may be regarded as an indication that there is a spiritual fact or idea knocking for admittance at the door of human thought. Thus regarded, the seeming lack points to the presence of supply — a better sense of good urging us to recognize its presence. Added spiritual growth will reveal it to us; and the human need will be satisfied by the acceptance and expression of spiritual ideas. This is a process of perpetual unfoldment. At whatever step in this unfoldment we may be, God has brought us there, and He will take us the rest of the way. This is divinely inevitable.

Can national or world-wide depression interfere with this unfoldment? Spiritual progression cannot be retarded or stopped, for it is Mind, God, revealed and expressed. No sense of depression can stop this appearing; nor can it cause us to believe that any stage of our unfoldment is a going backwards, when in fact it is but another proving experience. If we seem to be in a valley, we need but look to the high goal before us.

According to God's law there is nothing but unfoldment — the real replacing the unreal, the immortal putting off the mortal, spiritual ideas replacing material beliefs. There is no poverty of ideas, no lack of spirituality; there is only abundance, reality, substance, heaven — now.

In this unfoldment, this spiritual progress, there is always a next step to take. The fact and presence of a new sense of good awaiting recognition is the force, the propulsion, lifting us toward and into this new position of awareness of added spiritual blessing. Jesus had obediently taken each step leading up to the crucifixion when he made the great demonstration which proved the nothingness of matter and the immortality of man. How well he knew the great glory of revelation in the certain victory awaiting him! Human sense cried out to be saved from going through this valley, but his eyes were lifted high to the mountain top of life eternal. Did good cease in its unfoldment during the walk to Calvary when the hatred of a world seemed to be descending upon him? Every moment during that experience the divine fact of man's spiritual being was there asserting itself, lifting him nearer and nearer to apprehension of its reality, in complete demonstration.

In the same way, though in a less degree, each of us has our next step to take. God has a blessing for us, ready and waiting because we have obediently taken steps up to our present position. As we take each step we gain the blessing. These steps cannot be measured in hours, days, or weeks; time is not of the essence of their nature. There are erroneous beliefs to be put off, true ideas to be taken on. As long as the error seems more real than the good we must continue valiantly to battle on, glorying in the certainty of ultimate and complete victory, all the while conscious that God is strengthening us, giving us needed armor for journeys up to greater pinnacles of vision.

Let us never for a moment give credence to error in thinking that the valley experience is anything but the way to the heights; that unfoldment has ceased evil is clamoring. Our beloved Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 139), gives us this ringing call of courage: "Like the verdure and evergreen that flourish when trampled upon, the Christian Scientist thrives in adversity; his is a life-lease of hope, home, heaven; his idea is nearing the Way, the Truth, and the Life, when misrepresented, belied, and trodden upon. Justice, honesty, cannot be abjured; their vitality involves Life, — calm, irresistible, eternal."

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