Age doesn't have to consign us to the sidelines—in contributing, accomplishing, learning, giving. As the following account helps to illustrate, gaining an understanding of God, who is unending Life and Love, and learning to put Him first in our affections, have significant bearing on all the ways we live and love and work. Constance Benac, a mother and grandmother, former journalist, and longtime student of Christian Science, shares a particularly meaningful employment experience.

On the day I faced a divorce and loss of my home, I had been retired from my career for a year, and we were living way up in a mountain town. I was sixty years old.

At first I felt a crushing sense of humiliation. Then anger. I thought I had been a good wife; that I'd done everything. I'd been working in church and teaching Sunday School and studying the Bible Lesson ^{Found in the Christian Science Quarterly .} every day. I felt I didn't deserve this unjust climax. I was also worried because I didn't have any money of my own, our twelve-year old son and I didn't have any place to go, and I didn't see how in the world I could get back into the marketplace.

I took temporary refuge at the home of a cousin, a Christian Scientist, feeling completely sorry for myself and utterly confused. I remembered what Christ Jesus had said to his disciples when they were lost in grief and confusion and had tried to go back to their old ways of fishing for a living: "Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find." ^{John 21:6.} But I didn't quite know how to do that. My cousin, recently widowed, took a dim view of my self-pity. "What you need," she said honestly, "is to get back on the job."

"But I'm far too old to expect new employment now," I pleaded.

Employment, she reminded me, is the activity of right ideas. And there is no age limit to right ideas. "You have ample access to those books," she said. "Use them!" She pointed to my copies of the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy. The Bible Lesson for the week was as yet unread. Then she handed me a Christian Science Hymnal and left the room. I picked up the Hymnal and opened it to No. 324. This is when my healing began.

The hymn starts out, "Take my life, and let it be/Consecrated, Lord, to Thee." Well, in the first place, I thought, what is life? Is it really this tangle of human hurt and failure, like a soap opera we watch on television—a perpetual disaster? It isn't that; life is the consciousness of God, of the constant presence of His power. The dictionary describes consecrate as "to declare sacred, to devote to a sacred purpose." Well, was I really doing that—consecrating my life to God? No, because my thoughts were full of anger and resentment and suspicion and revenge. This is certainly not consecration to a good purpose! So I determined to do a better job of consecrating my life to God, good.

"Take my moments and my days, / Let them flow in ceaseless praise." Praise was better than self-pity, I knew. And so I put praise on the list with consecration. Then the hymn goes on, "Take my hands, and let them move / At the impulse of Thy love." I was at my cousin's house, and she had gone off to church and left some dirty dishes in the sink. So I got out of my chair and did the dishes to let my hands move at the impulse of God's love.

The hymn goes on:

All those years my love had mostly centered on one individual. Now I saw it needed to center on God. This gave me a higher sense of love, and I was determined to express it. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, "Whatever holds human thought in line with unselfed love, receives directly the divine power." ^{Science and Health, p. 192.} I could love unselfishly; I could devote my life to God. And I could love my neighbor as myself. I could love whoever and whatever came into my daily path.

A short time later, a friend sent me a promotional ad from a secondary school. She said, "Why don't you write to these people and see if they could use you." Well, I wrote to them, and they wrote back and said, "We probably have an opening for you, but you'll have to come for a personal interview." It was fifteen hundred miles away! But I was able to borrow a jeep and drive with my son to this school. I had the interview. They offered me a job, and my son could attend the school tuition-free. We accepted.

I started out working on a fund-raising campaign. I had all the tools and qualifications. But I was still angry at my ex-husband—and I soon became angry at the school, angry at everybody. It wasn't the heaven that I thought it was going to be. There was rivalry, and there was gossip and pettiness. I had to do something. So I worked with these lines in Science and Health: "Immortal ideas, pure, perfect, and enduring, are transmitted by the divine Mind through divine Science, which corrects error with truth and demands spiritual thoughts, divine concepts, to the end that they may produce harmonious results." And I also studied another statement on that page: "The Christlike understanding of scientific being and divine healing includes a perfect Principle and idea,—perfect God and perfect man,—as the basis of thought and demonstration." ^{Ibid., p. 259.} I realized I had to start by truly loving my ex-husband—and forgiving him.

Science and Health says, "Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals." ^{Ibid., p. 13.} When you love truly, you love impersonally—you love the real man, God's spiritual image and likeness. When I began to love this way, the pain, disappointment, and frustration began to fade. And I began to develop the faculty for looking through the illusion of mortality to behold and love the real, spiritual nature of people, no matter who they were. As I did these things, I really became happy and quite successful. And as my thought expanded with this higher sense of love, my life just kept expanding.

I got raises and was given higher levels of duties. I worked with the children and loved it. I took pottery classes, did some painting, writing, and even photography.

My attitude about employment also changed during this whole experience. I had for many, many years never been without a job of some sort. But I had depended upon skills and ego to get me jobs. That is, I would say, "I can do it. I can get a job," more than, "God has a place for me." God was "out there," but I thought I was really dependent upon my skill and my hard work. And so it was especially difficult for me to face it when I was retired and suddenly had to go back to work. Then I began to think more spiritually about employment.

I began to see, through Christian Science, that working hard isn't enough. Our employment has to be to the glory of God. And when our activity is to the glory of God and not to the glory of self, we really have a lot to do. We're fully employed all the time.

I got so that I prayed for the school by knowing that it was not governed by people but by God. At one point the school had to let many of the faculty go because there wasn't enough income to sustain all the employees there. It was hard for everyone. I remember praying at that time, "God help me to help the school." What happened was very interesting. I went on a trip to Hawaii that summer, and while I was there someone told me about a hosteling program. I went back to school and said, "Let's see if we can't connect with this program, because they lack a place for their summer activities." And you know, we got involved in that program, and it really filled that summer gap for us. It was a permanent remedy. The people who had been unemployed at the school in the summer were now employed staffing the hostel activities.

My whole experience at the school was most rewarding—working with teen-agers and promoting better education. During the twenty years I was there I learned many new skills, made several trips abroad, taught, worked as coordinator of a world affairs program, and wrote, designed, and put into publication many promotional pieces, school catalogs, and a school history. Those were years of accomplishment—fruitful years. And though I have now been retired (for the second time!) for several years, I still am very busy.

So what does all this prove? It proved to me that there are no limits to man's activity, and so no end to stamina, to learning; no need to accept isolation or failure; no need to succumb to any form of deterioration. We truly are never too old for employment if we are willing to listen for right ideas—spiritual truths—and put them into action through consecrating our lives to God and learning to love as He loves.