Article June 16, 2014 Issue

Bible Lessons and being alert

Marcia Cummings

Originally published as a Web Original on March 31, 2014

When I was in high school, back in the days when gas was around 60 cents a gallon, my friends and I would regularly cruise around town in my parents’ old 1970 Chevy Caprice. My friends and I called it the old Blue Bomb. It took us everywhere, even though the carburetor would stick, and I would often have to open the hood to stick a pencil in it to get it started. I remember we would often combine the loose change in our pockets and put in a dollar of gas to pay for what we used. We had a regular circuit we would take around town that included driving around the subdivisions and areas where friends lived to see if anything was “happening.” Those were the days!

Those were also the days when I started to read and study regularly the weekly Christian Science Bible Lessons. One particular week during this time, there was a Lesson that I found very interesting and thought about quite a bit. And to this day, I have never forgotten what I learned from it.

I don’t recall now what the particular subject of that Bible Lesson was, or which Bible stories or citations were used. But I do remember that a portion of it was about the idea of alertness. I remember thinking about and being intrigued that alertness is an attribute of God, divine Mind. I had learned a lot about God in Sunday School through the years, and about His spiritual attributes or qualities such as mercy, compassion, goodness, intelligence, wisdom, etc. And I don’t know why, but it had never occurred to me until that week’s Bible Lesson, that alertness was one of the qualities or attributes of divine Mind. And because we are God’s children, created in God’s likeness, we naturally express this spiritual quality. The Lesson also pointed out the importance of listening and continuously being alert to what God is telling us and directing us to do.