Editorial September 1, 1986 Issue

God hears and answers prayer

CAROLYN B. SWAN

Sometimes it seems that people love God only for His power to help them. One wonders, if God were a product of human design, would He be merely a gigantic ear that hears requests, attached to an immense hand that grants them unconditionally?

But we are not God's creator; He is ours. Since the Scriptures reveal that He is Love, Spirit, He is therefore incorporeal and infinite.^{See I John 4:16; John 4:24.} And this tells us something more wonderful than we might have imagined about how God hears and answers prayer. Mrs. Eddy explains: "The 'divine ear' is not an auditory nerve. It is the all-hearing and all-knowing Mind, to whom each need of man is always known and by whom it will be supplied."^{Science and Health, p. 7.}

In truth we lack nothing good. Our God-created individuality—spiritual man, created in the likeness of God—is always perfect and complete, having no element of evil because God, who is unopposed good, has none. The mortal sense of imperfection and incompleteness, dreamlike in nature, belongs not to our true individuality. Mrs. Eddy writes, "Wholly apart from this mortal dream, this illusion and delusion of sense, Christian Science comes to reveal man as God's image, His idea, coexistent with Him—God giving all and man having all that God gives."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 5.}