What a comforting, assured feeling we have when we know that someone dear to us is close by, that we do not walk alone or in an uncaring crowd! Sometimes the humdrum or the rush of day-today demands shouts so loudly that we can hardly find the inner peace we long for. Isn't this actually what most of us truly want— inner quietness, telling us something better than the commercialism and hurry so laced into the Christmas season?

Christian Science offers us this majestically different approach. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded this Science, gives a sense of the very presence of the Christ in these lines:

The prophet Isaiah foretold this coming of the Christ when he wrote: "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." ^{Isa. 9:6.} Isaiah was prophesying more than the coming of a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger somewhere in Bethlehem. Wasn't he visioning the coming of the Messiah, the human representative of the impersonal Saviour, the Christ, the divine presence—a presence that guides, feeds, nourishes, that walks with us through all our days, in all our ways?

This divine presence with us means that if we listen and obey, we won't blunder into confusion and human will. We won't drift into destructive criticism about ourselves or others. We won't permit habitual discouragement about political situations or economic events. Instead, as we walk with Love, each day of our calendar will become a Christmas, a Christ day. For we will be acknowledging the divine fact of God's perfection and intelligent government to be active and powerful right where the baffling, discordant limits seem to be.

How can we ever fully appreciate the lifework of Jesus, who illustrated for us the actuality of the Christ Science! His daily walk shone with the Christ-spirit, which healed and blessed all whom his thought touched. Mrs. Eddy speaks with deep affection and love for the Saviour—for example, in one of her Christmas messages: "To the senses, Jesus was the son of man: in Science, man is the son of God. The material senses could not cognize the Christ, or Son of God: it was Jesus' approximation to this state of being that made him the Christ-Jesus, the Godlike, the anointed." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 161.} Further on she continues, "Only three years a personal Saviour! yet the foundations he laid are as eternal as Truth, the chief corner-stone." ^{Ibid., p. 163.}

Is our vision free enough of the false mortal concept of man to enable us to understand the glory of what it means that man is the son of God, precious to Him—really precious? We hear so much of unpreciousness—of the counterfeit man as a castoff, hoodlum, or worthless person. But to realize we are precious enables us to behold a wider vista, opening into an expanded sense of God's infinite love for all.

Everyone was precious to Jesus. He saw man as God sees him, and this seeing healed. People didn't appear to him as they looked to themselves and thought of themselves. It was the Christ in him and as him that reached out to correct and bless.

It is entertaining the Christ-spirit that gives a lilt to our day and enables us to know we belong to God and are not just physique. Thinking from the basis of matter's supposed reality and power begins and ends with limits. Matter and limits are twins. Such thinking presents life as beginning with swaddling clothes and ending with a winding sheet. But in eternal Life's infinitude there is no time-line, no hurry-line to drive and pressure us. There is no age-line to restrict strength. No horizon-line to cramp our outgoing freedom. And no line of separation between God and man—as if God could be deprived of His expression, or man be pried loose from his cause and provider.

As we go forward we cease to parcel out our lives into bits of good and bits of not-so-good. The understanding of Science lifts us to a higher level, where we can begin to look out from divine Life to see creation and man as Life-encompassed.

Science enables us to know and trust a God of boundless love, whose allness enfolds each idea of His creation. Mrs. Eddy says of the awakening from mortal illusions: "This awakening is the forever coming of Christ, the advanced appearing of Truth, which casts out error and heals the sick." ^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 230.}

Great things happen to our strength and our capacity as we walk with the Christ-idea. We begin to know ourselves as Mind's reflection. With the divine presence, Christmas becomes not just a once-a-year day but an everyday event to celebrate with joy!

Are you letting this Christ day unfold itself to you?

O come, let us sing unto the Lord:
let us make a joyful noise
to the rock of our salvation....
For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the deep places of the earth:
the strength of the hills is his also....
O come, let us worship and bow down:
let us kneel before the Lord our maker.
For he is our God;
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.

Psalms 95:1, 3, 4, 6, 7