'Love never fails'

“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.

Yet there is no distance. There is only one creation—and that one is spiritual and perfect. We never leave it, so we need never return to it. 

One morning I saw how effective such an understanding could be. Before going in to work, and while praying at home, I felt really inspired. I’d been thinking about the completeness of God’s creation. I was realizing that a perfect God could never be responsible for a creation that was lacking good in some respect.

But almost as soon as I arrived at the office, I was faced with the evidence of lack. I was working at the time as a writer for a magazine covering the restaurant business. The night before, I had finished a draft of a story about the practice of hiring older workers—post-retirement age—in restaurants, and had given the story to my boss.

“You tried hard on this,” he was now telling me. “But there’s an essential element missing. You don’t have a single restaurateur speaking on the record about the potential downside of hiring older workers. And I don’t think you’ll get one. They’ll all be too afraid of potential lawsuits if they say such things too openly.” He advised me that the story would never work without such a quote and that we should drop it.

A perfect God could never be responsible for a creation that was lacking good in some respect.

After he left my office, I sat thinking for a few moments. Of course I could just let the story go. In the scheme of things it really didn’t matter much. And yet I had put work in on this, and giving up didn’t feel quite right. Then I remembered my prayer just a short while earlier. “Do I really believe what I was declaring?” I asked myself. “If God’s creation really is perfect and complete, can’t I see that fact right here and now in my office?”

So I got up and shut the office door and closed my eyes in prayer again. I declared firmly to myself that there could be nothing lacking—not even one tiny thing—in the perfection of God’s creation. I continued this way until I felt peaceful—maybe about two minutes. 

Then I opened my eyes. They fell on a bright orange folder just inches from the fingers of my right hand. I remembered that it contained notes from another story I’d recently done on a completely different subject and also contact information for several restaurateurs.

I felt impelled to call the very first name on the list. This woman answered almost on the first ring. I identified myself and explained that I was doing a story on older workers in restaurants. She said, “Oh, I guess you’re calling me because you know about the initiative I had to hire seniors?” I said, “No, I didn’t, but please tell me.”

It turned out that she was very knowledgeable on this subject and had no fear about sharing her thoughts freely and allowing me to publish them. The interview took about 20 minutes and gave me all the material I needed to finish my story.

There are almost one million restaurants in the United States, and most weeks while on that job I talked to dozens of restaurant owners. But that morning, in a matter of minutes, I was led to call an owner uniquely equipped to help me. We went on to publish that story, and my boss later identified it as one of his favorites of the year. He even nominated it for an award.

I was pleased. But of course it wasn’t really the story that mattered. It was the proof that right there, in the human realm, it was possible for me to declare and experience the perfection of God’s nature. And when I did that, the suggestion that there might be a tiny spot where God’s perfection was not, just disappeared.

It doesn’t matter what suggestions of lack or imperfection confront us as we go about our daily rounds. What matters is how we respond to them. Because, when we turn to God, we discover that His perfection is anything but remote. On the contrary, it is unfailingly present and invariably complete—always waiting for us to claim it.