Article June 5, 1937 Issue

Riper Fields

JOHN H. COURTNEY

Christian Scientists are not satisfied with human discords and handicaps, but are constantly endeavoring to bring into experience more of genuine peace, joy, health, and achievement. For they are learning, through the inspired teachings of Christian Science, that unlimited good may be demonstrated and experienced through a clear understanding of God and man.

There is a helpful lesson contained in the experience of a lad who had just reached his teens. It had been the custom of his family, living in a small village, to go to a certain fruit farm near by, each summer, and engage in picking and packing the ripened fruit. Early one morning the lad, the youngest member of the family, asked if he might go along for the first time and earn a wage like the others. He was told that he might go after he had attended to certain duties about the house. Shortly after his elders had left, the lad also set out for the fruit farm. As he walked down the lane in the bright early morning alongside the field where he was to be employed, he observed the fruit in that field, also the fruit in the field just across the road, where it was larger, more plentiful, and riper. Instead of going where his family had gone, he went to the owner of the field on the other side of the road, and there found employment. The lad secured the permission of his parents, and set to work at the farm across the road.

At sundown the boy met his family, and on their way home the day's earnings of each were discussed and compared. To the surprise of his elders, the boy, youngest of them all, had earned twice as much as any of the others. The older members of the family admitted that it had never occurred to them to look into the field across the road, because they had for so long been in the habit of going to the same farm. They had followed the course of time-honored precedent—the line of least resistance!

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