A Woman sat in her living room, heavy with fatigue and tension. The day had hardly begun, and the hours ahead were crowded with duties and planned activities. All that lay before her must be done that day. She could hardly summon up the energy to think about it, much less undertake the first task.

She knew she was forecasting a day with a difficult sequence of duties and foreseeing herself enduring it, contending with situations, with others, and even with herself. That scenario included an array of personalities, as well as possibilities of disorder, frustration, misunderstanding, self-condemnation.

But she had been a student of Christian Science all her adult life and had learned to rely on God, to trust in His care. She understood that she was really His child, His spiritual creation, in His kingdom, not a particular human being in a certain human experience. And she knew that this understanding could lift this sense of burden. She turned her thought from its oppressive predictions to the Bible, long a dependable source of inspiration.

"The Lord," she thought, "is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul" (Ps. 23:1–3). What she needed, she realized, was not more time or energy or help, but to bring her consciousness into the green pastures of the Psalmist—into the peaceful awareness of God's activity and direction.

How, she asked herself, do I join the Psalmist? How do I find green pastures and still waters?

She knew that the "me" of the psalm was not a human being in a context of care and responsibility, but the man of God's creating, as specified in the Bible. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him" (Gen. 1:27). She knew further that she herself was included in that definition, that, in truth, her entire being was the effortless expression of all that God was. She knew, too, that she must specifically identify herself as that spiritual expression.

"The Lord is my shepherd." At that threshold she abandoned all personal responsibility for the priorities, direction, and outcome of her day. She yielded all human planning and expectation to the authority of God, divine Love, whose relation to His creation is one of providing specific care, direction, and inspiration. She recalled from the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, "Love inspires, illumines, designates, and leads the way" (p. 454). Within Love's tender intelligence, she reasoned, there were no missteps, no abrasive encounters, no imperfect solutions, no defeated hopes. All she could experience or express was ordered by divine Principle, impelled by Spirit's energies, and given form by Soul.

"I shall not want," she recognized, was both a flat statement of truth and a faith-lighted acceptance of God's presence. Conscious of His all-powerful, ever-present care, she was safe from suggestions of frustration or failure. There, in the understanding of her true identity, she could indeed rest.

Her study and practice of Christian Science had taught her, again and again, to reject human limitations on the basis of one fundamental truth: God is All-in-all. From that standpoint she could experience and express the fullness of God's universe and her place in it.

Green pastures, Still waters. Paths of righteousness. She remembered these statements by Mrs. Eddy in Unity of Good: "God is All-in-all. Hence He is in Himself only, in His own nature and character, and is perfect being, or consciousness. He is all the Life and Mind there is or can be. Within Himself is every embodiment of Life and Mind" (p. 3). In the light of that truth, nothing could present itself as her history in circumstance, person, or activity that was unresponsive, misguided, or unproductive. Steadfast in the facts of God's allness, she could reject the arguments of separate mentalities and limited resources.

No matter what kind of work we undertake, our mental standard should never vary. As Mrs. Eddy writes, "To live so as to keep human consciousness in constant relation with the divine, the spiritual, and the eternal, is to individualize infinite power; and this is Christian Science" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 160). To live this way is indeed to "dwell in the house of the Lord for ever" (Ps. 23:6).

On this fresh, spiritual basis, she turned to the tasks at hand and went forward into her day, with the serenity and energy of spiritual conviction. From the breakfast table to the car pool to the office, from parenting to chairing a meeting, from making a grocery list to planning a program, she put each task, each encounter, each relationship, in the green pastures of God's government. Peace, harmony, focus, productivity, fresh ideas—all came without a heavy sense of herding others, of being in charge, or of carrying a personal responsibility for results.

The Lord was her Shepherd.