Article August 14, 1976 Issue

To Be Safe

CARL J. WELZ

We can feel safe and be safe under any circumstances, at any time. But such safety demands our devotion to God, who is our defense. God creates and maintains His image, man, in perfect safety. We experience that safety by identifying ourselves with God as the man of His creating.

Is it enough to say words of truth before the day begins or before entering an area where we are not sure we are protected? Words do help if they express God's allness and goodness, His presence, power, and love for all. But only if we use them to identify us clearly as ideas of the one Mind, which is God. Only if we really mean what we are saying. We need to become conscious of ourselves in a way that the criminal thought cannot find. Then we are dwelling "in the secret place of the most High."^{ Ps. 91:1;}

An attack on one's body seems to be one physical person attempting to injure another. Christian Science shows that the material body is not our dwelling place. We dwell in our consciousness. As our thought of ourselves becomes more spiritual, we become "absent from the body" and find ourselves in the presence of God. Then we cannot be hurt. Even our bodies are safe from attack from diseases or from criminal acts as we recognize that the physicality called the body is not what it seems to be. It is not matter with a mind in it. It is a concept of human thought—mainly our own. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, tells us in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "A material body only expresses a material and mortal mind. A mortal man possesses this body, and he makes it harmonious or discordant according to the images of thought impressed upon it. You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness."^{ Science and Health, p. 208;}

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