I had just moved overseas when I learned that my husband of 16 years was intimately involved with someone else, had rung up sizable debts, and had developed issues with alcohol. As I shared this with a friend who is also a Christian Scientist, she began to talk about my relationship to God.

As a lifelong Christian Scientist, I thought I had pretty much always prioritized my relationship to God. But I’ll admit that this relationship wasn’t the one that was uppermost in my thought right then. As I talked with my loving friend, however, I realized I could think more deeply about what it meant to put my relationship to God first in my life.

I started studying and praying from a completely different basis than before. Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “When we come to have more faith in the truth of being than we have in error, more faith in Spirit than in matter, more faith in living than in dying, more faith in God than in man, then no material suppositions can prevent us from healing the sick and destroying error” (p. 368).