Remember what fun it was, when we were children, to solve those "What's Wrong With This Picture?" puzzles on the comics page of the daily newspaper?

At first glance everything in the sketched scene seemed Ok. But almost at once you sensed that something really was "wrong," though the wrongness was subtle. Then you began to detect the carefully presented mistakes and list them: A ship might be in full sail up a country road or Uncle Sam's trousers might have horizontal stripes instead of the traditional vertical ones.

I remembered those puzzles one day last summer when I was cleaning a closet and found an old stenographic notebook.

"Prayer and Metaphysical Projects" was written on the cover in my own handwriting. The first ... entry was dated soon after I had become a serious student of Christian Science. The notebook was full, on both sides of every page; it was a record of my prayers in those days, and of problems I'd worked out, to the best of my understanding, in Science.

On one side of each page I had listed what I was praying about at the time and, on the other side, the date it was resolved or comments about the metaphysical understanding I was trying to gain.

As I read those long-ago entries, I felt almost as though I were intruding upon the privacy of an earnest young stranger I didn't want to offend or discourage. I'd forgotten most of the incidents recorded, though I did recall the more spectacular answers to my prayers, for example, the time a much-loved uncle had been healed of a near-fatal kidney infection after medical doctors had said they could do nothing for him, and he had asked me to pray for him in Christian Science. Or when my husband, whose musical career had been interrupted by naval service, returned home and was soon appointed soloist in a branch Church of Christ, Scientist.

Some of my prayers hadn't been answered. (Anyway, not with a "yes"!) Many of them I'd "carried forward" again and again—like the one for better living quarters. Because of the postwar housing shortage, we were then living in two small furnished rooms with kitchen privileges. We longed for a home of our own.

But sympathetic as I was to the young person who had written the journal, I suddenly began to have what I can only call a "What's Wrong With This Picture?" feeling, a sense that something was missing or subtly not in order.

That beginning student had been doing her very best, as far as she'd understood at the time. She had been praying with faith and humility, struggling, sometimes, to learn lessons that weren't easy for her. "Why isn't this easier for me?" she'd scrawled when trying to resolve some inharmony with an in-law.

I asked myself bluntly, then, had that young wife been praying for the wrong things? Had she only been asking God to give her material benefits? But reviewing the lists, I knew with relief that she really hadn't been doing that kind of praying. (Though she had done a lot of praying for supply.) She had been striving to see more of what God, divine Love, truly is. Next to several different entries she'd reminded herself with a line from Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, "Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need." ^{Science and Health, p. 494.}

The answer to the mystery of what felt subtly, uncomfortably wrong about the entries in the journal, when it finally dawned on me, was startling in its simplicity and its profound importance.

Some of the most stupendous, thrilling blessings in her life— my life!—blessings for which she would be forever grateful, had happened or begun to happen in those days, but they weren't in the notebook! She'd never consciously prayed for them.

Her listed prayers had been answered, even when the answer had been "no," but there had been a deeper, greater pattern running through those days, a pattern of inevitable, eternal good. The things that she—I—had never even thought to ask God to give her, but that had come into her experience, had, on the whole, been more precious than the items she'd put on her formal lists.

I don't mean by that that the prayers I'd prayed as a beginning student hadn't been important (they had helped to prepare me for the unasked-for blessings). Nor am I saying that we don't need to pray! After all, Christ Jesus left specific instructions about prayer in his sublime Sermon on the Mount.

Among his instructions on this subject is "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." And later in the same chapter of Matthew, after giving that pattern for our praying —called the Lord's Prayer—Jesus adds: "Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things." ^{Matt. 6:6, 31, 32.}

I know now that some of the very incidents or conditions I'd thought of in those early times of my study as "no" answers to my prayers had actually been sure and certain steps to greater blessings. There had been growth and progress for both my husband and me, protection and safety when we hadn't even known we were in danger, help in emergencies, loving new friends we'd never dreamed of meeting, opportunities to serve in many ways in branch churches, inspiration when we'd needed it most, uncountable blessings!

One "disappointment" had led to our moving across the country—and to professional advancement for both of us and the new home we'd dreamed of.

And there had been many instances of seemingly miraculous supply As I leafed through the notebook I remembered one example, not written in the "answered prayers" record but written in my heart.

After we'd moved into our first home, our funds wouldn't stretch to buy draperies to cover the extra-wide windows. One day I met on the street someone I had met only casually in the church where my husband was the newly appointed soloist.

Although she had no knowledge of our circumstances, in our conversation she said she had just replaced the draperies in her home. The old drapes were beautiful, of lovely fabric and workmanship, and they exactly matched our colors and even the size of our new windows. She was pleased to give them to us. We used and loved them for years, the symbol of a friendship that enriched all our lives.

I hadn't prayed for either drapes or friendship—nor for hundreds of blessings I've received. How could I have? I hadn't realized they existed. But there had always been a deep tide of goodness carrying them to us.

Realizing this on the day I cleaned my closets, I thought of the moving truth of the Biblical promise "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him." ^{I Cor. 2:9.}

As Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, in her beautiful study and contemplation of prayer: " 'God is Love.' More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go." And on the following page she adds: "God is not influenced by man. 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, pp. 6, 7.}

God certainly had never needed me to tell Him what was best for me. The "what was wrong" in the picture had been that at the time I'd written my journal, I hadn't really understood the greater, spiritual good always present. I simply hadn't yet learned that God—ever-present Love—does know what I and all of us need, even if we don't know. What He has prepared for us is more wonderful, more satisfying, than anything we could ever think of on our own!