Editorial May 11, 2020 Issue

Doing “life’s work”

Barbara Vining

Those words—“life’s work”—stood out boldly to me recently in a sentence I have read and been inspired by numerous times. It’s not referring to the daily tasks of our personal lives or places of employment. It’s about the “work” of living in a way that will do us the most good and help others. It’s about how Christ Jesus, the Son of God, lived his life on earth—letting his divine nature as the Christ animate his every thought, word, and action as he went about fulfilling his healing and saving mission to humanity. Here’s the full sentence, in which Mary Baker Eddy says of Jesus, “He did life’s work aright not only in justice to himself, but in mercy to mortals,—to show them how to do theirs, but not to do it for them nor to relieve them of a single responsibility” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 18).

Jesus came to show us—all men, women, and children—the true nature of God as universal Love, our oneness with God as Love’s spiritual likeness, and how to live this true identity and oneness as we navigate our human experience. He did this by living his own oneness with God. He never acted independent of God, but always turned to God to govern his thoughts, words, and actions. He lived his life this way to save us from sin—from mortal ways of thinking and behaving that are not characteristic of our true being and that bring self-imposed, unpleasant consequences.

Our lifework, then, is to live our oneness with God—our sinless nature as God’s spiritual reflection. And in order to do our own lifework rightly, we also need to be just to ourselves and merciful to others. We need to watch and pray to keep our thoughts and actions true to God, and to our own and others’ immortal nature as God’s spiritual reflection.

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Bible Lens—May 11–17, 2020