Business bounces back
Many years ago, I was faced with a failing business. I had been given a hardship discharge from the army to help my mother, who was hurt in a fall and had to shutter the business for weeks. When I returned home from Germany, I did what I could to run the store, but I had almost no background in running a business. We had no customers and no funds. We paid our landlady with furniture.
After my mother had returned to the store, I spent several hours a day at the Christian Science Reading Room, reading Sentinel articles and testimonies written during the Great Depression of the 1930s and early 1940s. I kept this up for several months but didn’t see any change in the business. Then one day at the store, at my darkest moment, I asked the question, “Is there really a God?”
In an instant, the answer came as a voice speaking to me, “I AM.” I recognized this as God’s response when Moses asks for His name (see Exodus 3:14 ). This reassured me that God was really there and that He had heard my prayer. I broke out crying, and my mom came and asked me if everything was all right. I told her that everything was perfect.
From that moment, unexpected things began to happen. A salesman who had worked for us before came and asked if he could work for us again on commission. I told him we didn’t have any customers, but he still wanted to come. Then the customers came, sometimes lining up to get into the store. We hadn’t advertised; they just came.
Next, the landlady suggested that if we could move out of the store by the end of the month, she would allow us to break our lease. Mom had tried for months to break the lease, but the landlady had been unwilling. Now we were able to move our store into a new location that had better traffic. After this experience, I reenlisted in the army, and my mother continued to run the store until her retirement.
Just to underscore the effectiveness of Christian Science and rule out the likelihood that this turnaround was a mere coincidence, something similar happened several decades later. By this time I had gone back to school to learn computer-aided design (CAD) with a specialty of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) industrial design. I had been out of work for several months when I received a letter telling me that my last unemployment check was in the mail. I went to my home office and asked God what I should do.
This time God’s leading came as a persistent thought to look in the classified section of the newspaper. I resisted, since I’d already looked there. The thought came again, only stronger, “Look in the classified.” I replied, “I have already looked, and no one wanted a person who does what I do.” When the thought persisted, I gave in and looked at that morning’s paper.
An ad for a draftsman/CAD designer would ordinarily be listed under “technical” or “engineering,” and I really had looked there. This time, though, I started at the letter A and read every single ad for work. When I came to “professional,” there it was. Someone needed an HVAC designer who was trained in a particular CAD system. I was that person.
I called the number, and after the employer had checked my work history, I got a call back in just a few minutes asking if I could come to work in the morning. I asked, “Work where?” The ad hadn’t given the location of the job. It turned out to be 300 miles from my home, and I asked if I could report to work the following Monday. (I had to have my car fixed to drive that far.) They agreed. Then they told me about a bed-and-breakfast in the area, and I stayed there for the duration of my assignment.
Now I had a place to stay, a job that had a 60-hour work week, with time and a half for anything over 40 hours. All I needed was to find a Christian Science church. So, I picked up my copy of The Christian Science Journal and looked for branch churches in that city. I looked at the address for the first church on the list and walked to the window of my room. Across the street from my boarding house sat First Church of Christ, Scientist.
These two healings stand as proof that God meets our every need when we look to Him with complete trust, expecting good.
Charles Pike
Charlotte, North Carolina, US
