Don't Be a Small Businessman!
We hear so much about the huge corporations that seem to dominate the business and industrial world that we sometimes forget that a major share of the world's business is still carried on by comparatively small firms, often owned and operated by a single individual or family.
As the commercial world has grown more organized, and complex, the challenge of running a successful small business has increased. Formidable competition from corporate conglomerates with rich financial resources, pressure from powerful trade unions, complex government tax and fiscal regulations, all these and many other pressures put the small businessman on his mettle simply to survive. He may well feel helpless, embattled, a lonely individual struggling against forces that are beyond his control.
If you are a small businessman who feels this way, Christian Science has an immensely helpful answer, an answer that may at first glance seem paradoxical: "Don't be a small businessman."
By this I don't mean that Christian Science will show you how to make a small business large, although that may well be the result for some. Rather, Christian Science will show you how to enlarge your concept of yourself and your business, and thereby gain control over the common beliefs associated with running a small business.
How to achieve this? By recognizing that our human experience is subjective, the result of our thinking. This realization applies not only to our bodies and our homes but to our business. As the Bible says of a man, "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he." Prov. 23:7 ; This means, then, that nothing wrong in our experience is beyond our ability to correct by changing our thinking.
Christian Science agrees that we are governed by whatever mental concepts we entertain in our thought, by the thought models we consistently accept, much as a computer is governed by the programs, or "models," that have been entered on its memory.
If our thought models include the image of a small businessman harassed by pressures beyond his control, then that may be our experience. If we see ourselves as helpless little mortals, hemmed in by market forces, aggressive competition, unfair labor practices, and the like, that surely will be the nature of our business experience.
Well and good, you say, but how do I change these thought models when they seem so persistent, so real?
Christian Science shows that the basis of narrow or limited thought models is a false and limited concept of God, which necessarily leads to a limited concept of man, God's image and likeness. Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health: "Mortal man has made a covenant with his eyes to belittle Deity with human conceptions. In league with material sense, mortals take limited views of all things." Science and Health, p. 255 ;
Christian Science reveals God, not as a glorified but still limited manlike deity to whom we pray for special favors, but as infinite divine Mind. Mind is the unlimited Principle of the spiritual universe, including man, and is already supplying man with all he really needs. Christian Science also shows that, contrary to the mortal sense of things, this spiritual universe, with its infinite ideas, perfect concepts, is the real universe, while the material finite world is only a poor mortal misconception, limited in every way.
What makes this spiritual view of things scientific is the fact that it can be demonstrated as having the power to enlighten and uplift the human thought and correct the so-called material experience. It does this through the application of divine metaphysics, the process by which we systematically exchange limited mental concepts for perfect spiritual ideas.
As Mrs. Eddy explains it: "The fading forms of matter, the mortal body and material earth, are the fleeting concepts of the human mind. They have their day before the permanent facts and their perfection in Spirit appear. The crude creations of mortal thought must finally give place to the glorious forms which we sometimes behold in the camera of divine Mind, when the mental picture is spiritual and eternal." p. 263;
But, you ask, how would this apply to a small business?
I would answer from an experience that happened to me. Some years ago a close relative, who is not a Christian Scientist, was having tremendous problems with his small business enterprise. On the one hand, he was faced with slow-paying government and institutional customers on whom most of his business depended. On the other, he was faced with a constantly rising payroll cost governed by powerful trade unions, and an intolerable work rules situation.
I went to visit this family during the time when the crisis seemed the most severe. The man had gone deeply into debt. There seemed to be no way out. Moreover, failure of the business could have had serious implications for my immediate family.
I was so depressed by the challenge that I knew I needed to clear my own thought and gain a better concept of what was really going on spiritually. One morning I got up very early and prayed for inspiration. It came in the form of a satisfying realization of a number of specific spiritual facts.
First, I discerned that the only real business is what Christ Jesus referred to as "my Father's business," Luke 2:49 ; the business of expressing God and His qualities. Obviously there is nothing small about this business, since God is infinite Mind. It was also evident to me that the infinite Mind is infinitely active and infinitely productive. In this infinite Mind there could be no outside pressures, no imbalance of supply and demand.
Further, I saw that in God, divine Principle, there could be no unfair practices, no lawless or unreasonable behavior, no inequities of any kind. I saw that there is only one infinite, perfect business, the perpetual omniaction of Mind and the perpetual reflection of this action by man. It became clear to me that this business is never small, never limited, and never threatened, but always harmonious, satisfying, rewarding, and fruitful. And I was convinced that in the spiritual reality of being this is the only business that man could ever know or experience.
For days after this, similar rich spiritual truths permeated my consciousness and blessed my own business activity wonderfully, so much so that I totally forgot about our relative's problem. Some two or three months later we learned that there had been a sudden change in his entire business situation. Not only were his immediate problems resolved in a remarkable way, but he was lifted entirely out of his rather limited concept of business into a new endeavor. This greatly expanded his activity, income, and sense of dominion, and has blessed the whole family ever since.
While I had not prayed specifically for this man's business, the result of gaining a clearer concept of the spiritual truths supporting all business brought into my experience the picture of unlimited improvement and progress, and in a remarkably short time. It showed again the power of correct spiritual thinking to improve even the most difficult human experiences.
To the small businessman struggling against similar problems, Christian Science offers the positive assurance that he can cease to be a "small" businessman. In achieving this, he willingly gives up limited concepts of his business and of himself, and reaches out for the spiritual facts of his true being as the image and likeness of the infinite divine Principle, Love. He recognizes that God's business is unfettered, infinite, and perfect omniaction, and that he reflects this omniaction in his own experience.
The businessman who does this will experience the truth of Mrs. Eddy's assurance: "This scientific sense of being, forsaking matter for Spirit, by no means suggests man's absorption into Deity and the loss of his identity, but confers upon man enlarged individuality, a wider sphere of thought and action, a more expansive love, a higher and more permanent peace." Science and Health, p. 265 .
