Article July 15, 2019 Issue

Watch your thinking, find progress and healing

Herb Jung

The tennis ball was coming at me faster, higher, and with more spin than I was accustomed to, and my return shots were going over the base line wide to the left and right. “Watch the ball, watch the ball. You’re not watching the ball!” my good friend yelled from the other side of the net as we practiced hitting backhands and forehands. I was sure I was watching the ball, but thirty minutes later, I discovered that he had been right. That little detail of watching the ball a split second longer made a big difference. It was a simple observation from a better player, and I was now hitting cleaner and more consistently.

Later, my friend’s words took on much greater significance and led me to question myself: How am I “watching the ball”—keeping my attention on God, divine Love, Truth, Mind—in my daily life? Could it be that, like my tennis game, my day-to-day spiritual thinking needs some fine-tuning?

These were legitimate questions, as I had recently found that my prayers concerning local, national, and international events were not alleviating my fears or fostering Christian sentiments. This was unusual for me because prayer normally brought me peace of mind. But without realizing it, I had been compensating for my failure to find comfort in prayer by grabbing hold of select news items that could validate my viewpoint and bolster my sense of security. This method would inevitably crumble into irritation, impatience, and despair when, for example, my web search engine came across news articles contrary to my opinions. Increasingly, I began to see the “deflection” of God’s creation (see Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 502)—a view of the world as divided into good guys and bad guys, and billions of different little minds—some good, some evil—controlling men, women, children, and governments.

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