Article August 29, 2016 Issue

Shake off the dust!

Linda Eysenbach

After I give our dog a bath, he shakes vigorously. This gets the water off much more effectively than my rubbing him with a towel. He doesn’t wait to decide whether he needs to shake or not; his response is immediate. Shaking off water is instinctive for him, an essential element of his nature.

One day I started to feel shooting pain in my shoulder. I thought it would just go away, but it continued to get worse as the day went on, to the point where I could not raise my arm. I turned to God in prayer. Perhaps because I had recently given our dog a bath, this passage from the Bible came to my thought: “Shake thyself from the dust” (Isaiah 52:2). To shake means to free yourself from something. What did I need to free myself from? Dust—the belief that I am material rather than spiritual, as stated in Genesis, chapter 1.

I started to think about how dogs shake themselves vehemently after they have a bath. Mary Baker Eddy admonishes us to use vigor in our prayers when she says, “Insist vehemently on the great fact which covers the whole ground, that God, Spirit, is all, and that there is none beside Him” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 421). Eddy defines dust as “nothingness; the absence of substance, life, or intelligence” (Science and Health, p. 584).