Article August 5, 2013 Issue

'Love never fails'

Marjorie Kehe

“Love never fails.” Those words came to me very clearly one morning while I was praying. They were familiar words, from the Apostle Paul’s writing in the New Testament (I Corinthians 13:8, J.B. Phillips), and I had known them all my life.

But this particular morning they felt urgent to me. I asked myself what they really meant. The answer that came was that God, who is Love, never ceases to be perfect and entire. And never really means never. Not at any moment, past, present, or future, or in any place, has there ever been an instant when God has not been unfailingly perfect. And if God is perfect, so must His creation be. As we read in the book of Psalms, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof” (24:1). In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy says clearly, “In Science, all being is eternal, spiritual, perfect, harmonious in every action” (p. 407).

It can seem, however, all too easy to get lulled into the belief that there are two creations. Some mornings, when I’m praying alone in my bedroom, I get a very clear picture of the spiritual perfection of God and His creation. But when I leave the house and head to work, it feels as if I’ve stepped into a second creation—one in which good and bad elements are pretty freely mixed, and in which good is only too limited and incomplete. And even though I try to hold on to the spiritual picture that I enjoyed during morning prayer, that sometimes starts to feel very distant during the rush of the work day.