Article January 29, 1979 Issue

Is it a trial or an opportunity?

RITA HAYES HORNBEAK

As long as a trial is considered a trial, it will seem to be one! Conversely, when trials and adversities are viewed as opportunities to awaken us to life in God and to forward our spiritual birth, they have inestimable value. Trials can force us to grow more rapidly toward recognizing our real spiritual identity, which is entirely separate from so-called material existence and material man. Christ Jesus instructed the Pharisee Nicodemus: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. ... Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."^{John 3:3, 5;}

Regeneration and the spiritualization of mortal consciousness are essential in this emergence from materiality. In science and Health Mrs. Eddy writes: "Mortals must emerge from this notion of material life as all-in-all. They must peck open their shells with Christian Science, and look outward and upward."^{Science and Health, p. 552;} This process—the new birth, or spiritual birth—involves changing one's basis from a material sense of God, man, and life to the spiritual sense of creation, in which perfect God and perfect man are the eternal facts of being. The new birth can start anytime. But all too often it takes a trial or sharp experience to turn us willingly to the divine Life, God.

God, infinite Spirit, perfect Mind, created the real man and universe. In God's ever-present, spiritual order, evil and matter, trials and troubles, do not exist or occur. Perfect good is unfolding within the infinitude of God's allness. Health, abundance, perpetual harmony, are all that spiritual man knows.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Poem

"I have called you friends"