Article January 29, 1979 Issue

"How does your garden grow?"

MARION J. HUKILL

Do you like gardening? I do. Pulling out weeds, tidying up the edges, enjoying the order and beauty that are the rewards of loving care remind me of the gardening each of us needs to do if we would keep our mental plots in good shape.

In Christian Science, tending our mental garden is a necessary, daily obligation. If we want to grow into that stature of spiritual understanding where we find our real identity as sons and daughters of God, we must be alert to the kinds of thought we are planting. Seeds take root and grow in individual consciousness. In "What Our Leader Says" Mrs. Eddy outlines the desirable process: "Beloved Christian Scientists, keep your minds so filled with Truth and Love, that sin, disease, and death cannot enter them. It is plain that nothing can be added to the mind already full. There is no door through which evil can enter, and no space for evil to fill in a mind filled with goodness."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 210;}

Obviously, evil seems rampant and boasts in many ways that it is motivating us. Becoming students of Christian Science doesn't mean we won't be challenged. But if we are mentally alert to God's allness, our garden gate will not open to evil's knocking. The important thing to keep strongly before us is God's allness. Mrs. Eddy tells us, "The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind,—that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle."^{Science and Health, p. 275;}