When a person finds that persistent inflation is reducing the value of his pension or annuity, he can react either positively or negatively.

Reacting negatively, he may accept fear and anger into his consciousness—fear that his carefully planned supply for his years of retirement will become too meager to meet the daily needs, anger that officials and industrialists and trade unionists have permitted inflation of wages and prices to persist. Acting positively, he can turn the seemingly adverse situation to advantage by seeing it as an opportunity to enlarge his spiritually scientific understanding of the nature of substance and supply and their inexhaustible source in God.

How one reacts to the dwindling of a particular source of income is a gauge of where one's treasure is—whether one is trusting in God's omnipotent bounty and provision or whether one is entrusting his sense of well-being to the play of the marketplace and to mortal thinking about supply and demand.

Christian Science teaches that man is never the victim of material law, chance, and circumstance. It unfolds beneficent, spiritual laws, far more powerful than economic theory, and these laws proclaim that God, divine Love, is ever cherishing and sustaining His spiritual idea, man. Through this understanding we can thus be perpetually supplied with all we need for our well-being, our progress. In reality, this supply is available today and every day.

Mrs. Eddy declares in her work Miscellaneous Writings: "Never ask for to-morrow: it is enough that divine Love is an ever-present help; and if you wait, never doubting, you will have all you need every moment. What a glorious inheritance is given to us through the understanding of omnipresent Love!" ^{Mis., p. 307;}

A person needs to be aware that he does not look narrowly to one single human source of supply. One can open his thought to the breadth of God's mercy, to the Father's ample care for His loved ones. Supply can be manifested humanly through myriad channels. Peter found the tribute money in a fish's mouth.

In clarifying one's thought of supply it is well to see that limitation and impoverishment are suggestions of the carnal, or mortal, mind. Material sense is always seeking to advance the arguments of limitation—limited income, time, strength, opportunity, enthusiasm, friendship. But God knows no limitation. He is infinite wisdom, the infinite creator, and He knows our every need and will supply it in full measure, no matter what the human picture of impoverishment may seem to be. Obviously, man created in God's image is not clothed in rags and fed on husks!

Christ Jesus said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." ^{John 10:10;} In God's kingdom there's no narrow eking out a precarious existence.

Then there is every reason to have a firm expectancy of good. Let us cultivate that expectancy. It is a great help here to understand what we are retiring from and what we are not. When we are no longer obliged to heed an early alarm clock daily, we should not relax into apathy or a comfortable materialism. We may indeed retire from our accustomed occupations or from the pressures of a time-clocked existence, but if one is striving to prove oneself the active spiritual reflection of God—manifesting God's wondrous attributes—one will not find himself retiring from the active study and demonstration of the truth of being. Indeed the chastening of divine Love, the law of spiritual progress, will demand his activity in the truth.

How shall we be active? An alert mentality will discover many opportunities. There is always the privilege and the necessity of expressing gratitude for good already received—for the fact that God's wise provision for His creation never fails.

Mrs. Eddy says, "While no offering can liquidate one's debt of gratitude to God, the fervent heart and willing hand are not unknown to nor unrewarded by Him." ^{Mis., Pref., p. xi;}

One may discover a need to pray for the world as well as for individuals. Praying for the world may include dealing with the widespread belief in, and fear of, inflation, which would diminish pensions, annuities, and other forms of fixed incomes.

We can affirm that, in God's harmonious kingdom, supply is always sufficient to meet demand, and demand is always present to utilize supply. We can know that under God's spiritual law there is no such thing as unreasonable wage-demanding or exorbitant price-setting, set in motion by fear and self-centered shortsightedness. The real, spiritual man loves his neighbor as himself. He is endowed with selflessness and wisdom. He does not seek to take advantage of his fellowmen. God's economy is not out of joint. The substance of Spirit is eternal; it cannot be devalued or deflated. In reality, there is no contagion of fearful beliefs to generate inflation. Affirming these truths will serve in a measure to lift mankind out of the mesmerism of inflation-recession.

We can be more unselfed. We can strive to be helpful wherever there is human need. We can understand that God is governing. And the reward? "Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it." ^{Mal. 3:10.}

Material circumstance cannot withdraw any good from man. One's demonstration of home cannot be threatened, if he consistently works at understanding that home is a spiritual concept embodying such components as harmony, comfort, beauty, permanence, sufficiency, kindness. One can know that erroneous suggestions cannot impair his sense of adequacy, his substance, intelligence, or joy.

So the remedy for the claim of diminished supply is not tight, worried grasping and willful planning. It is a joyous, trusting awareness of God's great goodness and His beneficent care for all of creation, and a readiness to practice the truth in daily living right where one is.