While in most countries kidnappings are relatively few, the media tend to bring many of us close to such events when they do occur. We should recognize them as opportunities calling out for our understanding of God. We should be moved to understand the spiritual facts when confronted by the injustice of such acts.

Powerful spiritual truths are available to heal circumstances surrounding a kidnapping. As helpful as human methods may be, turning to God with a proper understanding of His presence can be the most significant factor in establishing a solution.

Too often those most directly involved feel helpless. But positive and strong steps can be taken. Christian Science brings to light the fact that a clear, accurate perception of God and man's relationship to Him can be practical and effective in meeting any human challenge. While the immediate need may seem to center around the return of a human personality, a metaphysical approach requires an even more important preliminary step. It requires us to glimpse something of God. It calls on us to admit that God is ever present.

He truly is the only presence, thus the only power. God alone governs, motivates, and guides. He has established man as His representative, and man is expressive of His nature. God is Spirit, and man's true identity is spiritual. The one Father and His child are inseparable.

Man is found through an understanding of God. When we begin to perceive man's true nature as eternally at one with his Maker, the only source of being, we are, in a fundamental and essential way, finding an individual. When that individual is in some degree found, discovered, to be the child of God, the very reflection of one ever-present God, a powerful step has been taken toward a human solution.

Mrs. Eddy 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 ...." On the next page she continues, "Spiritual man is the image or idea of God, an idea which cannot be lost nor separated from its divine Principle." ^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 302-303;}

In reality man's true being is never kidnapped. The child of God can never be taken from his full and secure and complete relationship to God's ever-presence. As we begin to yield sufficiently to this incontrovertible spiritual truth, human circumstances are drawn into a measure of conformity with it.

The fact that God is ever present is a healing truth for the human fear that an absence has occurred. As one reasons prayerfully he can begin to understand that since God is ever present and since man is the reflection of God—representing His presence—then man, by this reflection, expresses presence. There is no element of absence. Here and now are the facts of God's allness. Erring mortal concepts cannot overthrow those facts.

As we establish in consciousness, clearly and intelligently, these divine realities, an irresistible and healing force is brought to bear on unjust, wrongful, and discordant human conditions. Paul tells us of the security of our true being: "Your life is hid with Christ in God." ^{Col. 3:3.}

We should be unselfish enough to turn our thought Spiritward when society is confronted with a kidnapping. But are we impelled to make the same healing efforts when little kidnappings take place more directly in our own lives? If each of us brought specific healings to these "unreported" events, kidnappings that make headlines would be reduced.

For instance, have we ever, through personal attraction, drawn someone away from his home and family? Have we allowed a too close relationship to rob that family of their loved one? Or have we ourselves been a kidnap victim? Have we found ourselves carried away—even if only through fantasy—by an attractive human personality? Have we been taken away from those who love us? Might not a subtle sort of kidnapping be involved in such instances?

The same spiritual facts can bring healing. God holds His child in his rightful place. No individual, in his true being, can be carried away from his eternal oneness with God. Man belongs to God, not to person. As we understand this fact it will aid in bringing faithfulness and stability to human relationships.

Perhaps we have been abducted from our church. Oh, we may not have recognized it as a kidnapping. Animal magnetism, the supposed attraction toward materiality, would have disguised it as a disagreement, a loss of interest, perhaps disillusionment or lack of love. We deserve to be freed and permitted to return to the blessing that can embrace us when we have our full relationship with our church family.

As we prayerfully examine our lives we may find ways to be freed from being either victims or perpetrators of kidnapping.

Whatever form this wrongful act takes, its solution begins with a deeper awareness and love for God and the universal family He sustains. His children as divine ideas are forever held in their distinctive niche. They cannot be removed. They are never taken from the place that God has established. Our expanding recognition of this truth serves not only as a preventive force, but when the need arises, it supports a return to more harmonious conditions.

Nathan A. Talbot