Editorial October 12, 1935 Issue

Our Opportunities

Duncan Sinclair

It is not uncommon to hear people lament lost opportunities. They look back over the years, perhaps to the springtime of their lives when hope ran high, and, thinking of their lack of success, bemoan their weakness, their inertia, their poverty of the qualities which make for accomplishment. How many have failed to do the right thing at the right time—to seize their opportunity! How many have failed to do the right thing at the right time through indifference, laziness, procrastination, sin! Here is how Mrs. Eddy writes on the subject of opportunity on page 12 of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany": "This was an emphatic rule of St. Paul: 'Behold, now is the accepted time.' A lost opportunity is the greatest of losses. Whittier mourned it as what 'might have been.;" She adds, "We own no past, no future, we possess only now." And heartening words they are to all who would break away from what has seemed to be an unsuccessful past and experience a successful present.

How are we to regard the now which we possess? To do so correctly we must know the truth about real being, the truth which Christian Science reveals. In reality there is only one real power, one real presence—God; and man is God's reflection. This means that there is not a single idea or quality of God which man does not express. It means also that, since the real selfhood of each of us is by reflection endowed with divine qualities, divine ideas, we are each spiritually equipped to meet and master every adverse situation. But it lies with us to use these qualities or ideas. James says in the first chapter of his epistle, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." And every good and perfect gift is ours to use because of man's unity with God, perfect Mind.

Opportunities for using divine qualities or ideas are always at hand. Is not the world famishing for love? The opportunity therefore for giving out love is always with us. Every moment we can be expressing divine Love, thus blessing individuals and, indeed, the whole world. The effect of reflecting Love is always a healing one. Everywhere mortals seem to encounter the false beliefs of evil, such as envy, jealousy, malice, covetousness, hate, anger, revenge. Nothing will ever destroy these errors but Love understood and demonstrated. To understand divine Love as infinite is to know the unreality of evil, whatever guise it may assume; and whoever knows the unreality of evil and pours forth the love which is of God upon his fellow men, blesses them as nothing else can.

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