A valley experience is often dejection in depth. Sometimes it is a trapped feeling of personal imprisonment, of being surrounded with seemingly insurmountable obstacles or threatened with physical torments. The way up is the only way out.

Some years ago the writer was aroused to realize that he had wandered into just such a valley. He had become weighed down by keenly competitive business activities, forgetting to put the things of the Spirit first. Ultimately he found himself sitting in the depths of gloom. When a physician advised an immediate operation, the climb out of this valley became the most important steps in his life!

Pondering his problems, he recalled a fear-filled experience of his youth at a time when he had lost his way in a valley growing swiftly dim in the dusk. As a lowering curtain of mist inked out the stars, he had decided to spend the night there and had built a fire on a wide, fiat rock. The cold, dark, and seemingly interminable hours that followed were filled with the dread of insects and creeping things of the night, with rustlings in the bushes that suggested prowling night life lurking just beyond the shadows. Grotesque shapes cast by the flickering embers of the fire took on the chilling threat of a hostile presence. And yet, next morning, as he climbed out of the valley and looked back upon the scene, its sunlit and breathtaking beauty amazed him. He realized how groundless his fears had been.

Reviewing this, the writer prayed to know and to prove that the grotesque shadows and chilly mists of his present valley experience were no more real than those previous fears had been. He was led to read what Mrs. Eddy records in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, of her own valley experience: "When apparently near the confines of mortal existence, standing already within the shadow of the death-valley, I learned these truths in divine Science: that all real being is in God, the divine Mind, and that Life, Truth, and Love are all-powerful and ever-present; that the opposite of Truth,—called error, sin, sickness, disease, death,—is the false testimony of false material sense, of mind in matter; that this false sense evolves, in belief, a subjective state of mortal mind which this same so-called mind names matter, thereby shutting out the true sense of Spirit." ^{Science and Health, p. 108;}

This statement was born of Mrs. Eddy's actual experience and was based on truths she proved. Hence these truths can be taken literally and acted upon. She had proved the carnal, or mortal, mind's sense of matter, which shuts out the true sense of Spirit, to be but a false belief and no part of the real, spiritual man's true being.

When one stands steadfastly upon the truth that God is his Life, and that God, good, is all-powerful and ever present, he can refuse to accept as real the threatening terrors of the night of error. The dawning light of ever-present divine Love enables him to release himself from the illusion of imprisonment within a fleshly, sometimes diseased, body and to rise to his true status as a child of Spirit, God. Isaiah encourages us: "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee." ^{Isa. 60:1, 2;}

The pitfalls and depths of mental depression have only the substance of shadow, illusion. But not everyone manages to spring out of them with a single leap. Sometimes it's a step-by-step process. Every path out of a valley must go uphill. But the light of Truth, as revealed in Christian Science, shows the way. Christ Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," ^{John 14:6;} and he proved it by healing the sick and raising the dead to a new sense of life. In speaking of God the Scripture tells us, "In him was life; and the life was the light of men." ^1:4; It is this light, this here-and-now Christly consciousness, that illumines the pages of the Christian Science textbook, brings the dawn of a new day to the human view dimmed by valley mists.

In Science and Health we read, "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation." ^{Science and Health, Pref., p. xi.}

The truth of being or its opposite—which to choose? It will be found that the mortal view, the false sense of man as material and temporal, fades in proportion as the true view is seen and accepted as the real.

The man of God's creating is never really in a valley of sorrow, disease, or death; the expression of eternal Mind cannot be limited or depressed. Because man has his being in God, this everywhere-presence is the only place he can ever be. As spiritual consciousness dawns upon human thought and faith takes on the firmness of conviction, valley mists and shadows must melt away. The human self becomes evangelized. Thought ascends to see and to feel the healing operation of Truth in human experience. It was this transformation of thought that enabled the writer to rise out of his valley experience, healed in mind and body. Christian Science enables all who are ill and sorrowful to do the same.