Article April 12, 1993 Issue

Square pegs and round holes

No matter how challenging your circumstances may be, God's law of love opens a way of freedom.

Beryl Horner

Have you ever felt like a square peg in a round hole? It can be very uncomfortable! I know, because I felt that way once, and things looked pretty hopeless.

I was in a job I hated, feeling frustrated, underemployed, lonely, and full of self-pity. There appeared to be no way out. After several miserable days I realized that, deep down, the basic problem was not a dead-end job; rather it was the feeling that I was separated from God, divine Love. Wishful thinking and human planning were useless. I'd tried them, and they didn't work. I knew the answer lay in prayer—in realizing much more deeply that I was a cherished idea of God, "cared for" and "watched over," as a hymn in the Christian Science Hymnal phrases it. ...

From my childhood our family had been Christian Scientists, so it was natural for us to pray in times of sickness or when we faced troubles of any kind. Over the years there had been numerous proofs of God's ever-presence and His healing love. Such proofs had shown me that, to be consistently effective, prayer needs to go beyond asking our Father-Mother God to do something for us. In many instances it requires a willingness to persist in the acknowledgment that God has, in fact, created all, and that His creation is entirely harmonious and good; that it is totally spiritual, expressing His nature as divine Spirit. The Psalmist declares, "The counsel of the Lord standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations" and "He spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." praying from this standpoint, realizing the eternal, unchanging goodness of God's creation, we begin to see that it is not logical to assume that an all-loving God would create sickness, lack, or any other problem and then leave His offspring at the mercy of such circumstances.

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