Editorial October 8, 2018 Issue

Turning

Rich Evans

During the second flight lesson, the instructor asked me to fly toward the gathering storm clouds in the Kansas sky. He said to turn in the opposite direction at the first buffet from the wind. I did. The lesson was learned: You don’t need to continue flying into a storm. By turning away from harm and toward safe harbor, one naturally is separated from discord.

All of us have moments when it appears we are flying into the “storm”—confrontation, illness, unkindness, self-absorption, criticism, unfair judgment—whether it’s being stirred up by us or by someone else. It’s good to remember that these conditions represent a false model of who we, and all, actually are as expressions of the divine character. Staring at the wrong model won’t help us, and may draw us in. We may get buffeted around down that path, until we let Love’s, God’s, influence change the direction of our thinking.

In her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, available to everyone, the inspired author Mary Baker Eddy asks: “What is the model before mortal mind? Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have you accepted the mortal model?” (p. 248). This model is a gathering storm, a false attraction, something wrongly accepted as a norm, sometimes with an accompanying sense of inevitability—like the common phrase, “It is what it is.” The implication being that one will just have to endure going through the darkness and the head winds with their consequences.

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Bible Lens—October 8–14, 2018