PLEASE GOD

GOD'S MESSAGE COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE GRAPHIC

By Joan Taylor

A couple of years ago, I was planning to visit friends for a long-anticipated weekend, but it was all I could do not to cancel. I'd had dizziness and nausea for several days and just didn't see how I could make the drive. Still, my daughter had just left for camp, and the back roads ahead of me looked like a welcome adventure, so I set off.

On the sun-dappled drive across dairy country in upstate New York, I began to crumple. The symptoms got worse, and I became really frightened. I'd been praying about this as I usually do when I'm not well, and right then and there, I prayed by seeking to understand more about God's care for me and for all His children. I wish I could say I stayed in that clear mental place, but other thoughts kept tumbling in: "What if I don't get better?" "Why this trouble now?" "Should I turn back?"

A few miles farther on, a gigantic billboard loomed up ahead. It was poking up from a meadow, and on it were just two words in huge black letters: "PLEASE GOD." I clutched the steering wheel and thought, "Yes! Please, God, help me!" But as I drove past the billboard, I looked closer. It didn't say, "PLEASE, GOD" but "PLEASE GOD." I smiled. What a difference the missing comma made.

For the rest of my journey it was as though I'd just walked out of a bad movie. I spent the remaining minutes and miles contemplating the question, "What is the prayer that pleases God?" As the answers came, I also found myself feeling better. Soon, the symptoms, which had been so strong, were just gone.

As I drove on, I remembered that in Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy addressed the limitations of prayer that is made in the form of a petition to God. "Asking God to be God is a vain repetition," she wrote, and she asked, "Can we inform the infinite Mind of anything He does not already comprehend? Do we expect to change perfection?" (p.2.)

Christian Science has given me a way of praying that's immediate and spontaneous— and potent. Prayer, as I'm learning to understand it, could begin with silently knowing, as you're inspired at that moment, what might be called "the facts of spiritual existence"— what God is to you, who you are as God's spiritual creation, and the qualities that are yours as His daughter or son.

When we understand that in God's eyes we are perfect right now, based on the fact that God is already perfect and creates only that which is like Him, then there's no need for pleading or begging for something better. Prayer in this vein builds on the rock of humility and love. In humility I find myself saying/praying, "God, I am so grateful to mirror aspects of Your nature. In my gratitude, I love to shine with peace, gentleness, fearlessness, and an abiding conviction that You are infinite Mind itself. I don't have to help, coax, advise, or convince You. I already have Your complete attention because You are ever awake, ever responsive, ever caring for each one of Your children."

The sacred message that came to me on the "no comma" billboard has been especially useful in recent months. It keeps putting me on the road to praying more effectively. If I find myself getting upset about an uncertain world where regimes, economies, loyalties, and opinions change by the moment, I can change my viewpoint instantly, or as the Bible puts it "in the twinkling of an eye" (I Cor. 15:52). Prayer enables me to expect improvement in my life and the lives of others by finding God, still in His place, where He's been all along.

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