When my mother passed on many years ago, I was grief-stricken, especially because I was living in a different country and was not able to attend her funeral. Even though I did visit my relatives shortly afterward, I continued to experience feelings of emptiness, grief, and distance, which I was not able to shake for several months. 

One day I was reading that week’s Bible Lesson, found in the Christian Science Quarterly, and some words from the book of Hebrews stood out. The passage read, “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” (12:1). 

I had often wondered what was really meant in that passage by the mention of the sin that “so easily beset[s] us.” Suddenly it became clear to me that the sin that encompasses all other sins, and therefore so frequently besets us, is the belief that we are separated from God.