"Lift up your heads"

JOSEPHINE F. HOWARD

What an encouraging and loving admonition is found in the Master's words, "Lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh"! What tender understanding it betokens, what compassion to all who are struggling with a false sense of discord, of loneliness, doubt, and self-pity, for it shows the way out of the tangled web of wrong thinking. Whatever our environment, whatever the discordant circumstances, wherever we find ourselves, right there in the midst of the difficult conditions we are to obey the injunction, "Lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh."

By lifting up our thought to God, good, looking not upon the seeming discord as real, but turning from it to the truth that man is always in the presence of God, expressing the joy and confidence which are our spiritual heritage, we shall find the glory of God filling our consciousness to the exclusion of those thoughts which would separate us from the harmony that is ours by right of man's sonship with God.

It is always a change of thought which must first take place, for in Christian Science we learn that discordant conditions are the outcome of wrong thinking. In the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, the way has been pointed out, and the method we must use clearly set forth. She writes (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 123), "Divine Science, rising above physical theories, excludes matter, resolves things into thoughts, and replaces the objects of material sense with spiritual ideas."

That we have made mistakes in the past is no reason for our not going forward today with confidence, and assurance of the Father's loving care. Have we listened to the whisperings of error that past mistakes are a stumbling block in our path; that we have tried again and again, and have failed? Perhaps we have tried to progress while still clinging to the mistake as a reality, falsely ascribing power to that which has no power. The real man of God's creating has never made mistakes, for he has never been separated from God, who is of "purer eyes than to behold evil."

Since God is perfect, His reflection, man, is also perfect. As the truth dawns on our thought, it is with joy and thanksgiving that we go forward, keeping watch over our thinking, lest we be deceived by accepting as true that which is no part of real being. As we obey divine Principle, our feet are planted safely in the right path, and the belief in error as real loses its power to retard out spiritual growth.

As we understand and reflect the divine Mind, the sense of loneliness disappears, for we find that we, as God's children, are never alone. Doubt gives place to confidence as we feel the ever-presence of Truth, and self-pity is destroyed in the glorious realization of our oneness with God. So we press on, knowing that all power belongs to God, and that evil has no power; and through the reflection of divine Love we are enabled to overcome the claims of evil. Instead of its being an arduous task, we find it a joy to follow our Leader's words (Christian Science versus Pantheism, p. 6), "Finally, brethren, let us continue to denounce evil as the illusive claim that God is not supreme, and continue to fight it until it disappears,—but not as one that beateth the mist, but lifteth his head above it and putteth his foot upon a lie."

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