If someone is faced with severe financial, emotional, or physical problems, the world usually understands, even expects, the reaction to be sorrow or fear or dread. Believing they're expected to respond in certain ways to problems, people tend to live up to those expectations. Some believe untoward circumstances are "fate"—possibly foreordained by God. Therefore their reaction may well be resignation or stoic acceptance of pain or disaster. However, someone believing in a good Supreme Being may have difficulty reconciling disaster to the divine scheme of things and may well wonder, "How can God cause or allow evil?"

Christian Science answers, "He neither causes it nor allows it." This divine Science separates evil from God and His creation. It explains that evil actually has no place in God's creation and must therefore be seen as unreal. Fundamentally, evil is a wrong believing—a believing based on testimony obtained from our own concepts, concepts in turn based on the physical senses. But as we turn to God Himself for our understanding we begin to see things quite differently. Christian Science also teaches that man is completely spiritual, wholly good, and inseparable from God. In fact, man is to be learned to be God's perfect image and likeness.

This is not to imply that a Christian Scientist, when confronted with human misery, ignores or unfeelingly turns from it. Rather, he seeks to bring healing to the situation by emulating Christ Jesus, whose compassion surpassed commiseration and helped people find healing through divine Love. Jesus helped mankind raise its expectations of life—from sickness to health, from sin to perfection, from death to life, and this is our goal as well.

When Jesus was faced with a supply of food that appeared to be limited, he turned to God, his Father, expecting impartial beneficence. That expectation was translated into a practical feeding of thousands. Jesus' understanding of man's actual unity with God aided those in need. It replaced world-weary hopelessness with glimpses of God-given exemption from all diseases, lack, sin, and even death. His pure and holy life set the standard of perfection that entitled him to be called the Saviour, the Messiah, or Christ. And he expected his followers to emulate him in being Christlike and solving the world's problems through healing.

For instance, when we hear or read about disasters that would play on our fears, we have every right to refuse to succumb to being fearful or hopeless. Such events do not coincide with God's plan for those He loves or with the spiritual, perfect nature of the universe He has created. The Bible represents God as saying, "I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end." ^{Jer. 29:11.} If God, being only good, does not—indeed, cannot—think of evil in connection with us, why should we? We're in a position to overcome disaster when our thoughts coincide with His thoughts. This coincidence brings us to the "expected end" that He gives, which can only be good.

At times of challenge, our recollection of divine help given in the past tends to strengthen our trust in God. Every Biblical account of divine assistance should bolster our expectancy that good can come to our own lives in an infinite variety of ways. Confidence gained from understanding God's power and from claiming our wholly spiritual nature as His man counteracts terror and nullifies evil's effect. Our recognition of God's support in the past tells us to expect a perfect present and a perfect future for Him and His. And we're His!

For example, if we're involved in an accident, we can trust immediate aid from God's law and love. One such law is that we cannot be removed from good even for a split second. Understanding this alleviates panic or the fear that recovery from injury may be slow or impossible. The very fact that God is eternal good, that He is, should prove that His care is not intermittent or retarded, but continuous and immediate. In fact, the same divine Love is available today that was available in healing those who came to Jesus. Trusting in divine immediacy and secure in the knowledge that all that belongs to God is forever spiritual and inseparable from Him, we can claim exemption from any aftereffects.

Four generations in our family have had individual proofs of this comforting fact. By relying entirely on Christian Science they have been healed quickly and effectively. One of the more recent instances occurred when our granddaughter was injured in a bicycle mishap outside her junior high school one morning. She landed face first in the street after flying over the handlebars. A crowd soon gathered, and the school authorities got in touch with her mother. The child firmly refused all well-meaning attempts of the adults present to send her in an ambulance to the hospital, and she prayed for herself until her mother arrived. The paramedics, concerned over the bruises, cuts, and swelling, cautioned both mother and daughter about all the physical things to watch for. Thanking them for their concern, the mother and daughter left for home.

The mother felt the dual responsibility of conquering her own and her daughter's temptation to be fearful of the physical conditions and the warnings of the paramedics. She tried to keep the conversation and her own thoughts from being overwhelmed by the physical evidence.

When they arrived home they telephoned a Christian Science practitioner and asked for additional prayerful help. The practitioner's poise and loving attention, his confidence in divine Truth, helped them to expect quick and complete healing. They felt the presence of God's care, comforting them and impelling them toward rapid recovery—which did take place! Within half an hour the child's face regained a normal appearance. By the time she returned to school the following morning, she had only a small scrape on her forehead, and that cleared up in a few days.

In retrospect, both mother and daughter were struck by the contrast between the scene they had left at the school the day before and their prayerfully expectant thought at home. Rumor, without basis in fact, grew at school until the worst was expected; there were even speculations that the accident might result in fatality! Fear, spreading unchecked, had created a bad and false picture; whereas fear, checked by prayer and trust, had been eliminated and replaced by confidence and healing. And when the girl appeared at school the next day as usual, how comforted and happy everyone was to share in the joy of her improvement and normal appearance.

Such proofs tend to reinforce our expectation of good results from reliance on prayer alone for healing, whereas worldly expectation would tend to immerse us in the material scene, starting us at the bottom and sometimes keeping us there.

Contrasting a spiritual sense of things with the material, Mrs. Eddy says of the latter: "This human belief, alternating between a sense of pleasure and pain, hope and fear, life and death, never reaches beyond the boundary of the mortal or the unreal. When the real is attained, which is announced by Science, joy is no longer a trembler, nor is hope a cheat." ^{Science and Health, p. 298.}

To succeed in resisting the down-pulling influences that would appear to surround us, we must identify ourselves not as material objects of pity or fear but as the spiritual ideas of God —Love and Life. Only by such spiritual identification can we make advances in conquering sin, sickness, grief, and death.

In a letter, Paul told the Corinthians, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." ^{I Cor. 15:26.} An enemy is not destroyed while we are in any way in subjection to it. An enemy is made ineffective only when thoroughly trounced by effective weaponry. And one such weapon is the spiritual expectation that starts with God. Acknowledging His omnipotence tends to orient our view of any situation toward what God is and does.

When Jesus promised, "Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," ^{John 11:26.} he was affirming that a right understanding of God's Son would lead mankind to understand the creator, Life itself. When we acknowledge that the same divine impetus of Christ, Truth, is present in us, we are also recognizing the one and only creator, God. This helps us to annul His opposite— sin, sickness, and death!

So where does all this understanding and acknowledgment lead? It leads us toward good and away from helplessness. It leads us to expect consistently and to experience more frequently God's best instead of the world's worst. And as we do this, we find that nothing is too good to be true.