Article November 30, 1992 Issue

Gaining dominion over the demands of daily life

When the frustration of having too much to do and too little time closes in on us, we can, through prayer, discover our God-given dominion.

Marian English

For quite a while I had felt a full step behind the many demands on my time. The pressure became acute one evening as I tried to prepare for a Wednesday evening church service. Everything needed to be done, nothing was happening, and my husband had been detained at his work. Worst of all, one of the children was suddenly feverish and fretful, and his need superseded all else. There was too much to do and too little time to do it. I felt as though my life were controlled by time, or rather, lack of it.

What do we do when the demands seem greater than we are able to meet? One tendency is to try harder; another is to consider lack of time a chronic, hopeless condition and learn to live with it. But there's another way, and it's the one I glimpsed that evening. I reasoned that simply moving faster was not going to meet my child's need, and it wasn't really preparing me for church, either. From experience I knew that prayer, as taught in Christian Science, heals. So I sat down in the midst of the confusion and began to think of the many insights into the Bible I had gained through my study of Christian Science, and the healings that had followed.

My prayer was one of protest against the frustration of stress—a resolute acknowledgment of the presence of peace and spiritual power where there seemed to be neither. In the quietness of prayer I began to feel enormous gratitude for the happiness, health, and security our family had enjoyed as we increasingly understood our relationship to God. Tension and worry melted away, and after a few minutes I realized the pressure to "get things done" had dissolved, replaced by the calm of dominion and gratitude. The child who had been feverish began playing happily, completely well. Tasks that had loomed so importantly took on their proper proportion and were easily finished.

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