Article September 9, 2002 Issue

Why we are NOT helpless

By Barbara Vining Contributing editor

Often when some unthinkable atrocity touches human lives, feelings of uncertainty start cropping up. Since the events of September 11, 2001, for example, people have frequently felt that they just can't possibly know how to be sure of their own and others' safety. They wonder: Will it happen again? Where? When? How? And all these unknowns can make a person feel helpless to do anything to prevent what he/she fears may happen.

My own fear of the "unknown" has often been completely overturned by considering the first part of this description of that term in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "Unknown. That which spiritual sense alone comprehends, and which is unknown to the material senses" (Mary Baker Eddy, p. 596).

Whenever I read that, I do a mental about-face. Instead of being stymied into a quagmire of worry over what my limited human mind doesn't know, that passage sets me to work to learn more of what God knows.