Article May 29, 1989 Issue

Evidence—how do you recognize it?

Spiritual law enables us to meet human needs even when the circumstances don't seem very promising.

Cynthia K. Philip

Being married to a salesman who works on total commission, I've faced a daily demand to get a firmer understanding of our ability to rely on God in meeting our needs. But one particular period stands out in my memory. We had just moved to a distant state, a move that we felt had been God-directed. This move had been expensive, but the new position my husband had accepted seemed a blessing—with the exception of the financial aspect of it while he worked to build contacts and a client base. Where would the money come from to pay all those bills that seemed to be arriving daily?

As I prayed about this situation, I began to think about the word manifest. Christian Scientists sometimes speak of healing or of help being manifested in their experience. But what, I asked myself, does manifest really mean? I knew that whatever is manifested or made manifest is made evident—"readily perceived," as a dictionary puts it. But how is it perceived? How do we perceive it? Just through the material senses or through God-given spiritual sense?

Up until then I had been using the word in a very material way. When explaining how healing was made manifest, my example would have been "I prayed for substance and supply, and it was manifested in a check received in the mail the next day." This was a pretty limited and material outlook because it implied that the material outcome was the manifestation of God's power.

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