Since April, spirituality.com has been publishing a weekly article in the series, "Spiritual solutions to end poverty: What Christian Science has to offer." The series has featured writers from Australia, India, Japan, the Philippines, Switzerland, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others. To see all the articles, to www.spirituality.com/poverty.

TONY LOBL, one of the writers for the series, recently participated in a live online chat on the subject. A Christian Science practitioner and contributing editor to the Christian Science magazines and to spirituality.com, Tony is also District Manager of Christian Science Committees on Publication for the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Excerpts from the chat follow. To read or hear the whole chat, go to www.spirituality.com/chats/poverty.

I live in a major metropolitan area where we see people begging on street corners every day. What can we do to help, above and beyond the spare-change approach to giving?

I think those of us who have a sufficiency in our daily lives are challenged with knowing what is the best way to respond when someone's asking for money in that way. I've certainly had the awful experience where I've given someone money out of a sense of compassion, and ten minutes later, I saw the person with a bottle of alcohol in his hands.

But I've also had another experience. I got on an Underground train here in London, and there was this homeless man who was being really rowdy, swearing, and threatening—to the point where people even began to move to the next carriage of the train because they were concerned about what he might do next.

I can't remember where I'd been, but I know I was in a good, prayerful mood. And so I looked at this man with the idea, How can I see God's perfect man? Or more accurately, How can I not see God's perfect man if I really believe that God is the Creator? So I felt that I should go and sit right next to this guy and talk with him.

The moment I started talking with him, he calmed down. He said his name was David. I talked to him a bit more, and he said, "Who's your God?" I said, "I worship the Christian Science God." Mrs. Eddy does use that phrase once in Science and Health, "the Christian Science God" (p. 140). That seemed to end the conversation, and we went our separate ways.

About two weeks later, I was serving in a Christian Science Reading Room, sitting there praying. A man came in, holding a beer can and smoking a cigarette. It was the guy whom I'd been sitting on the Tube with! I looked at him with love in my heart. And I said, "David!" and welcomed him in.

We sat talking, and I think it was that week, or the week before, that the Sentinel, a sister publication of spirituality.com, had focused on articles about overcoming alcoholism. After our conversation, this man was so open to it that he took that Sentinel and went away ... totally calm, totally happy.

I haven't seen him since, so I can't tell you what the outcome is. But for me, it was a very holy, spiritual experience because it brought me back to the need in every case to see the individual, and not lose sight of that. It's so easy to see "a homeless man" or "a poor person," or all these labels we give people. But there's always an individual there, and that individual, if we're willing to look clearly enough, is the child of God.

How can one guard against having to face poverty in the future, while still in college?

It's not something I had to contend with as a student. When I went through university, I had the great privilege of a government that paid your fees and even gave you a grant to live on. But I do feel that every suggestion of the need to go into debt has an answer. One of the great experiences I had was with debt, actually. There was a debt hanging over my head, and I was determined to meet the issue through prayer, through understanding how God would help me.

It occurred to me to look through the Bible and Science and Health to see what they say about debt, and to think spiritually about the subject and what it really means. I had a very easy time of this because I opened on the Lord's Prayer and got to the line that says, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

I studied mathematics at the university. And I stopped when I got to that passage because I thought, There's a mathematical equation there. It says, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." If I forgive my debtors, I will find that my debts will be forgiven.

But I thought, I don't have anyone who owes me anything. I'm the one who owes others. As I explored my thought, though, I saw I did have a sense of other people being indebted to me—family, friends, other people I'd helped. I had a sense that I'd done them good, and they owed me something for that. That wasn't conscious—I wasn't going around thinking that. But when I explored my thought, it was there.

Then I thought, No, all good comes from God, the only source of good. No one owes me anything or ever will. To the degree I've been able to do any good, the debt is to God, just like my own individual debts for the good in my life are to God. And with that, I got really clear that no one anywhere ever owed me anything.

Immediately after that, I got a series of jobs from different sources that were just wonderful the way they came forth, cleared the debt, and enabled me to go forward with important projects that I needed to do.

How can a wife demonstrate her individual supply when it appears a "husband"—a channel for her supply—has a different, and sometimes conflicting, demonstration to make?

We recently had an article in a newspaper here called The Voice, which features the African community and Caribbean community in the United Kingdom. The article was called, "Women's liberation: key to ending child misery," and it talked about the need to free up women to be independent in their control of the income they have.

As I was praying about those kinds of issues around the world some time back, before I was a member of a branch Church of Christ, Scientist, one thing that occurrred to me was to consent in my own thoughts to the fact that God's Mother-love, God's motherhood, and its reflection in all of us, cannot be obstructed or paralyzed or hampered or hindered or kept back.

I thought, Well, what about me? Am I expressing mother-love qualities in my life? What are those qualities? And one of them I saw was that wonderful quality of the mother's commitment to the child in a family. And I asked myself, Am I suppressing that mother-love in me and refusing to be committed to joining church and being a part of taking the movement of Christian Science forward?

I realized I needed to change—to say, I'm not going to be fooled. I'm going to make that commitment. I'm going to go forward, and to serve in any capacity I can. And that was on the basis of realizing the need not to let the qualities of mother-love, motherhood, or womanhood be kept down in me individually, or in the world.

But that kind of thing really needs to come on a spiritual basis. It will have practical results, but obviously if it's purely a political or a social motivation, then it can go down wrong as well as right avenues. But if it's about spiritual growth into more fully embracing the motherhood that is reflected from God, then we'll be led in the right directions.

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On August 15 at 2 p.m. the chat on spirituality. com will address spiritual solutions to stress and will feature Mark Swinney, C. S. B.