Article November 26, 1979 Issue

Safe in God

Lesley Clyne

It was a cold winter's day in England, and it had been raining hard in the night. The stream in the forest was usually quite small, but now it rushed along between its banks and nearly reached the bottom of the plank bridge. Jonathan, who was four, had gone for a walk beside this stream with his mother and his little sister, Melanie. They saw two bigger boys, aged about nine, leaping about and playing a little way from the stream on the flooded meadow.

As Jonathan was leaning over to look at the rushing water, he fell from the bridge into the stream. As first there wasn't any sign of him—he didn't bob up again, bob up again, and his mum thought he might have got caught underneath the bridge. She was a Christian Scientist, and this helped her not to panic but to turn to God for the right answer. She knew that God is our Mind and our Life, as Christ Jesus proved, and that we can always find a right answer if we turn to God, because all true thoughts and actions come from Him. The Bible puts it this way: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths."^{Prov. 3:5, 6;}

She called to the bigger boys, "Come and help me!" And then, "Could one of you hold Melanie's hand?" because Melanie was too little to stand on the bridge alone. Jonathan's mother was going to climb down under the bridge to set Jonathan free when she saw him being carried along fast by the current, under the water. He would be carried out of reach unless she did something fast. Again she turned to God, Mind, for direction, and the answer immediately came: "Jump in!" She did and landed with an enormous splash, almost on top of Jonathan ("I thought an elephant was landing on top of me," he said later), and tugged him up over to the bank.

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