Does God exist? If so, can He help with human troubles? If He can, why doesn't He do it more? And how can I enlist God's help when I need it?

These questions perplex a lot of people today. Yet the Bible states categorically, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." ^{Ps. 46:1;} Many people through the ages have found this to be true. But many more are still unconvinced of the effectiveness of God's help.

Christian Science explains that God does exist, that God is good, that He is always at hand, always active, and always supremely powerful. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, "All that worketh good is some manifestation of God asserting and developing good." ^{Message to The Mother Church for 1900, p. 10;} God's qualities are palpable and powerful. As we let them permeate our thought, they permeate and transform our experience.

God is Love, embracing all of His creation. God is Mind, imparting intelligence and wisdom. God is Soul, expressing spiritual beauty and affluence. It would be difficult to think of a situation where more wisdom and more love and a more affluent thought would not help. And all these qualities belong to man as God's expression.

God's help does not usually come miraculously or spectacularly. It comes gently and unobtrusively by touching and spiritualizing individual human thought. How do we feel God's presence? Through consecration and prayer rather than through human reason or material observation.

Why is God's help not more universally apparent? Because people have a material, personal sense of themselves as mortals cut off from God or outside and beyond His help. Instead, they need to see themselves as divine ideas emanating from God, expressing His nature and qualities.

Some people have a false theological sense of their unworthiness to receive God's help. Others have a humanistic sense of self–sufficiency that needs no help. Still others have a materialistic sense that sees no hope of help except through material means and methods. All of these beliefs have to be dissolved. But this dissolving process is the first thing God can help us with.

The slightest feeling of being embraced by divine Love begins to dissolve any mortal sense of rejection. The smallest grasp of the magnitude of divine wisdom and intelligence begins to dissolve any mortal belief of self–sufficiency or self–depreciation. The least glimpse of spiritual beauty and affluence begins to dissolve materialistic values.

Most of our troubles arise from accepting a suggestion of the absence of God—at some time or in some place or for some individual. But God is never absent for a moment, and understanding this helps us to feel His saving, healing presence.

One evening a young woman telephoned a Christian Science practitioner and asked for treatment for her mother, who had a lump on her neck. Both mother and daughter were very troubled.

The practitioner asked the mother to study the passage in Unity of Good where Mrs. Eddy writes, "If God is ever present, He is neither absent from Himself nor from the universe." She continues: "Christ cannot come to mortal and material sense, which sees not God. This false sense of substance must yield to His eternal presence, and so dissolve." ^{Un., p. 60;}

The pain stopped almost immediately. The patient felt reassured and less fearful. It later came to light that because of an unhappy experience many years before, this woman had withdrawn into herself and shrank from meeting people. She hadn't even been out alone for a very long time, and there were many accumulated fears and reproaches to be dissolved in her thought.

Treatment was continued, and a passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was studied and applied. Here Mrs. Eddy writes, "In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error, —self–will, self–justification, and self–love,—which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death." ^{Science and Health, p. 242.} Other "self" traits like self–condemnation and self–distrust were added to this list.

Before long the lump opened naturally, drained gently and thoroughly, and the place gradually healed. One evening the patient told her daughter she would go and call on a neighbor she hadn't seen for some time. From then on she began to lead a normal life again, doing her own shopping and taking pleasure in meeting everyone.

Nearly all troubles involve some degree of self–justification. Self–justification explains how the trouble arose in the first place and gives it a cause and history. Perhaps self–deception, self–reproach, self–will, self–love, and self–pity crowd in and make the trouble seem worse and the help more remote. Self–renunciation is needed to dissolve all this so we can accept the present harmony that is natural to man as God's reflection.

Enlisting God's help either in or out of trouble is not demanding favors from Him. It is turning to Him as our source of help, much as we turn to the sun for light because we know that is where light comes from. Then we never fail to have the comforting reassurance that God exists and that He does help.