Just because a problem looks impossibly complex does not mean the solution needs to be equally complicated.

Consider a much-loved Bible story. A widow has run through her resources. The creditor pounds at the door. Her two sons are about to be seized and pressed into service as bondmen to the creditor. But wait! The prophet Elisha enters the scene. He questions the widow. “What hast thou in the house?” She replies with an openness about her circumstances that may hint an openness to spiritual remedies. “Thine handmaid hath not any thing in the house, save a pot of oil” (see II Kings 4). Elisha apparently senses more is on hand, and the widow’s simple answer leads to a seismic solution. Elisha directs her to canvass the neighborhood, collect as many empty containers as possible, and fill them with the oil from her own pot. The many containers are filled. From the woman’s original and inauspicious response to Elisha’s “What hast thou in the house?” came an unexpected and lasting solution.

There’s a consistent basis for such happenings. Ultimately, there is only one fountainhead for problem-solving ideas. That is the one God, the one all-knowing Mind, the sure and certain source of all goodness, of all inspired ideas. This Mind operates with scientific consistency. It provides innovative insights. Almost certainly the prophet Elisha realized on some level something of the divine nature and something of how the Divine provides for its creation. Did that realization—that prayer—propel even further Elisha’s turn to the Divine? Plainly, that prayer resulted in difficulties resolved, solutions found. It was a matter of first glimpsing the resources of Mind as within his reach and then mentally grasping them.

What hast thou in the house? Enough problem-solving spiritual ideas to resolve whatever dilemmas we face.

Fast-forward 3,000 years. Shift your focus to a problem unforeseen in Elisha’s time. Yet, perhaps that question, “What hast thou in the house?” still applies. Consider the problem of global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions. Could a simple answer meaningfully address the current need? It sure looks like it. A good answer—albeit a temporary one—appears within reach. The key? Refocus. Zero in on reducing soot and methane. Soot—coming from cookstoves and kilns in the third world, and from inefficient boilers and unfiltered diesel engines in the rest of the world—does greatest damage when it falls on snowpack. Then, instead of snow in all its whiteness reflecting much of the sunlight back into space, the soot-darkened landscape absorbs more of the sun’s radiation.

Methane—which leaks from coal mines, pipelines, sewage plants, and more—traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than does carbon dioxide. Drawing on existing technologies we can capture methane before it reaches the atmosphere. As one scientist said, reducing soot and methane are “things we know how to do and have done. We just haven’t done them worldwide.”

The worldwide reality of God’s ever-presence means good solutions await the knottiest problems. This God is inexhaustible Mind, the source of all healing intuitions, all problem-solving inspiration, whether for difficulties simple or complex. Mary Baker Eddy, a lifelong student of the Bible and the discoverer of Christian Science, knew firsthand that turning to Mind unveils inspired remedies. She wrote in her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “. . . the seed is in itself, only as the divine Mind is All and reproduces all—as Mind is the multiplier, and Mind’s infinite idea, man and the universe, is the product” (p. 508).

Do problems of the 21st century multiply at an alarming pace? At any moment one can ask and answer, What hast thou in the house? Enough problem-solving spiritual ideas to resolve whatever dilemmas we face. The Mind that multiplies all good would not have it any other way.