One day, while I was teaching Sunday School, my class and I discussed the different ways our parents express love toward us. First, the pupils mentioned shelter, care, and food, but soon we spoke of our Father-Mother God, and how our parents' love for us is—at its best—a reflection of the love God expresses toward His offspring.

I thought back a number of years when I had been faced with a series of challenges that shook my concept of where love comes from. I had grown up expecting always to have my parents around to offer their love, support, and guidance. Soon after I graduated from college, however, my mother suddenly passed on. My sense of the closeness of family was shaken, and a void seemed to appear where love had once been. I prayed to God in search of answers and asked another Christian Scientist to help me pray to resolve feelings of grief and loss of love.

A little over a year later, my father also passed on unexpectedly. During that time of spiritual study and prayer following my mother's passing, my relationship with my father had become much deeper. Greater mutual respect and understanding had developed as I had begun to see him as God's spiritual idea and not foremost as my father. Throughout this period a new understanding of parental love slowly developed as my relation to my Father-Mother God became clearer and closer through prayer.

After his passing, as I was rethinking my whole concept of family, I realized that I had still been viewing it more from a biological than a spiritual standpoint. Over the next year, the Bible and Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy led me to a new, higher concept of love. During my studies, one of Mrs. Eddy's poems, "The Mother's Evening Prayer," stayed with me. I found it comforting when discouragement set in, but it left me wondering what she meant by the passage "Wait, and love more for every hate, and fear / No ill,—since God is good, and loss is gain" (Poems, p. 4). I was very confident that I understood the loss, but where was the gain?

After I had spent some months searching and growing spiritually, the sense of loss began to disappear permanently. During the same period, for the first time in a long while, a profound sense of love came flooding into my life. What was unfolding was a spiritual understanding of the eternal nature of divine Love. God's love proved never to have been absent. It had simply been obscured by belief that it had died with my parents. This higher, expanded understanding of parental love gave me a new and enlarged appreciation for my parents.

In an account given in the New Testament, Christ Jesus tells us who our parents really are (see Mark 3:31–35). As he spoke to the people gathered about, a messenger came to Jesus to tell him his mother and brothers were outside asking him to come to them. The Bible goes on: "And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother." Through this simple lesson, Jesus established that our family is more than our physical relatives. All who follow God are our family. We have to look beyond what human observation says and see all as the children of one divine Parent. Holding this right thought about man, we see it manifested in our own and others' lives.

As I pondered these new ideas about love, I continued to look to the verse in Mrs. Eddy's poem that I mentioned earlier, wondering how loss could be gain. Humanly, I needed to lose a personal sense of love, which then opens up a true understanding of God's love. Spiritual growth revealed that my original idea of love was only a limited concept of real love. The higher thought rises, the more our perspective is changed. This opens us up to new opportunities to express and receive Love, God. A passage in Science and Health says, "The wintry blasts of earth may uproot the flowers of affection, and scatter them to the winds; but this severance of fleshly ties serves to unite thought more closely to God, for Love supports the struggling heart until it ceases to sigh over the world and begins to unfold its wings for heaven" (p. 57). My experience was showing me how the human loss of parental love could lead anyone to what is truly permanent in love.

What originally seemed to be a human loss, Love revealed was the way to my understanding more of our never-absent Parent, our Father-Mother God. Science and Health says further, "With one Father, even God, the whole family of man would be brethren; and with one Mind and that God, or good, the brotherhood of man would consist of Love and Truth, and have unity of Principle and spiritual power which constitute divine Science" (pp. 469–470). By embracing the right concept of ourselves and our brethren, we are affirming the totality of God's family and opening our experience to God's love, which can never be extinguished. This healing thought brings to us the understanding that we are all one brotherhood, loved as God's children, and always within God's loving embrace.