With great joy, enthusiasm, and delight I walked down the street recently, so grateful to be alive. I was praising God for His goodness. I had gratitude by the bucketful. How far I had come! Twenty years earlier I had pleaded daily with God for me to be dead. Life had challenges at every turn, and I had decided that suicide was an answer.

My husband had quit his job, and there was no income. My marriage was a failure. I had felt that my family would not accept me if I filed for a divorce. And if I did get a divorce, I had few marketable skills to support me and my two small children. I was suffering daily from migraine headaches, which left me struggling to care for the children. I felt trapped and depressed.

A kind and intuitive neighbor came to my rescue like an angel message. At her urging I went to stay with family members beside the ocean. I took long walks each day, reaching out for God's messages. "Dear God, give me an answer and give it to me now," I yelled one day. And the answer came, "Go home and bake brownies." The answer made me laugh out loud—which I had not done for years. What kind of answer was that for such a desperate situation as mine? But I had heard this answer with the same intensity and clarity that I had asked the question, so I pondered the answer.

I understood that the greatest thing, the thing that's most needed in the world, is love. And I began to see that this response to my request—to bake brownies—could be seen as a demand to love, and to love more than I had been. In the beginning I baked a lot of brownies—for neighbors, for teachers, fellow church members, the postman, and on and on. But gradually my outreaching love took new directions as I continued to focus on sharing with others.

My prayers were daily supported by treatment from a Christian Science practitioner. We prayer together, cherishing me as God was doing. God was loving me and so must I. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" is the Biblical command that Christ Jesus urged on us (Matt. 22:39; see also Lev. 19:18), and so this became my daily task. As I reached out with my brownies, I found more ways to love myself as God's image, more ways to love enough to trust that God would show me the way out of depression and failure.

In time the headaches ceased to be a part of my day. My self-respect increased as I loved God and His creation more. And I learned to feel what Mrs. Eddy tells us on the epigram page of Miscellaneous Writings: "My world has sprung from Spirit, / In everlasting day" (p. vii).

At one Wednesday evening testimony meeting, the healing of the blind man was read from John's Gospel. In it the disciples ask Jesus, "Who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" Hearing this, I realized I was looking to fix a cause for my own situation. My answer was in the next verse: "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (9:2, 3).

I did divorce my husband, and I did find daily answers to my needs as I raised my children alone. Every need was met through prayer: homes, jobs, finances, complete companionship, tuition for college for the children, even a move across the country.

"To bake brownies" has become a symbol for loving more, for loving even when there is no possible human return for my loving and caring. My return for my giving comes from God in the opportunity to know Him better.

Name withheld