What can religion do to help with problems that seem to involve loss—loss of opportunity, loss of funds, loss of happiness, loss of peace and health?

Religion can change thought. And thought changed by spiritual understanding brings, first, the realization that one cannot lose what is real; then, the inspiration that results in retrieval or replacement in the particular area of apparent loss. Finally, it dispels the haunting fear of loss by finding a spiritual sense of things, which is not losable.

Christian Science explains God as divine Love, always caring for His creation, man, and endowing him with all good. Man is not a material personality, dependent on his own resources and constantly exposed to loss and deprivation. Man is a spiritual idea, created, maintained, and provided for by divine Love. His substance does not consist of matter, physique, or material acquisitions, but of spiritual qualities like perception, intelligence, and love, which can never be lost.

Christ Jesus said, "The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost." ^{Luke 19:10;} And in the fifteenth chapter of Luke's Gospel, he devoted three parables to the subject of losing and finding. These are the lost sheep, the lost piece of silver, and the prodigal son.

In each case Jesus contrasted losing with finding, rather than with getting or gaining. This indicates the possibility, indeed the necessity, for each individual to demonstrate spiritual completeness at every level of human experience, so that no sense of loss or fear of loss can blind him to the ever-presence of infinite good.

Christian Science explains that saving what seems to be lost can extend to physical problems involving loss of sight, or hearing, or mobility, or vitality. All of these can be restored through finding that they are basically spiritual, not material, and are therefore not subject to loss or deterioration.

A student of Christian Science suffered an injury to one of her eyes. The pain was severe, but she refused to accept any sense of injury or loss of vision. As she was unable to read for herself and the pain persisted, she telephoned a Christian Science practitioner and asked for treatment.

The practitioner had been studying the passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures where Mary Baker Eddy writes, "If it were possible for the real senses of man to be injured, Soul could reproduce them in all their perfection; but they cannot be disturbed nor destroyed, since they exist in immortal Mind, not in matter." ^{Science and Health, p. 488;}

She read this passage to the patient and then continued to relate it to the situation by declaring that in her true selfhood this individual was a divine idea whose completeness and intactness were maintained by divine Mind, that her sight was spiritual, not material, and therefore not subject to loss or damage. Within an hour the pain stopped, and normal vision was restored.

Human reasoning is prone to accept loss with resignation, to write off mistakes, to relinquish material possessions as expendable, to bow to economic circumstances that seem beyond individual control. But the unit in Mind's creation is always a thought, not a material thing. An understanding of God as Mind and the prayer that keeps human thought close to this Mind make it possible to demonstrate God's continuing care for man in finding solutions to every human problem, including loss. Mrs. Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes: "The material body and mind are temporal, but the real man is spiritual and eternal. The identity of the real man is not lost, but found through this explanation; for the conscious infinitude of existence and of all identity is thereby discerned and remains unchanged. It is impossible that man should lose aught that is real, when God is all and eternally his." ^{ibid.,p. 302.} The marginal heading beside this paragraph is "Identity not lost."

Most human problems represent a sense of loss or deprivation in some form. Poverty suggests loss of substance. Disease represents loss of health. Sin indicates loss of integrity. Some people have never known what it means to be affluent, healthy, or honest. Others have experienced these things on a material and personal basis, and then have lost them. Discovering the spiritual character of supply, health, and integrity, we find them to be God-bestowed, and this makes them universally available and secure.

When the connection between thoughts and things is understood, it becomes apparent that improved thought is externalized in better human conditions. How can we change thought most radically and beneficially? Through prayer. Through acknowledging and accepting our spiritual identity and its intactness, and by stripping thought of loss-inviting qualities like greed, self-interest, and limitation.

Any sense of loss implies a misconception of what we think we had to start with. When this misconception is corrected, we find that the basic reality—the divine concept, rather than the thing that appears to represent it—is still there, waiting to be understood, acknowledged, and demonstrated afresh in human experience.