Article December 26, 1970 Issue

Looking Forward to Now!

CYRIL ALEXANDER BARBER

How can we escape from fear of the future?

Most human beings have some tendency to fear the future. The unknown—so the human mind argues—may prove to be evil. It may include financial disaster, loss of friends, ill health, accident, or sheer inability to cope with people or circumstances. Even when such fears are subdued and bearable, they may nag destructively and make real happiness impossible. Our task is to destroy them utterly so that they will not come to the surface in situations of crisis.

Living with fear is makeshift living. It is the kind of living Christ Jesus came to transform. He said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."^{John 10:10;} He did not recognize as life the mere ability to be a normal human being with normal human fears. He never pointed out to people that sudden fear could affect the bloodstream and so better fit them to cope with an emergency. He told them to give up fearing. He implied that loving God and one's neighbor was real living; his teachings leave no place for fear. Moreover, he proved what he taught, not only by living fearlessly himself—his joy in the Father untouched by those who sought to destroy him—but also by his unexampled ministry of healing, which as Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, makes plain in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, was necessarily a ministry of powerful release from fear. He, above all men, surely knew the fact later stated by Mrs. Eddy for our guidance in healing: "When fear disappears, the foundation of disease is gone."^{Science and Health, p. 368;}