Article August 20, 1990 Issue

Preaching the gospel to ourselves

We normally think of sharing the spiritual truth of God's love with others. It doesn't always occur to us that sometimes we need first to evangelize ourselves.

Mavis Rose Latham

It once seemed I couldn't talk easily—or should I say with confident, knowledgeable understanding—of Christian Science. I had accepted its truths as indeed the only way to harmony and peace. Its teaching that man is completely spiritual and inseparable from God, good, meant a lot to me. Yet my grasp of the Science of these truths had not been such as to make me vocal in sharing my understanding of God with others.

At one point I made a diligent effort to understand what Christ Jesus meant when he spoke of the spiritual harvest he expected of his followers. He said, "Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." This surely meant that as a laborer for God I could participate in this ready harvest—this sharing of spiritual truth that I loved. But before I could go out into the marketplace and evangelize, I wanted to be sure, in words, of what I was offering of my own spiritual understanding.

As I prayed about this desire, I had glorious moments of illumination. But there seemed to be little progress toward overcoming my hesitation. Then a quotation from Retrospection and Introspection, a little book by Mrs. Eddy, came to hand: "The best spiritual type of Christly method for uplifting human thought and imparting divine Truth, is stationary power, stillness, and strength; and when this spiritual ideal is made our own, it becomes the model for human action."

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