Whose life is it?

Prayer that is firmly based in Jesus’ teachings and Mary Baker Eddy’s revelation of Christian Science is a powerful healing agent. Look for occasional articles in the Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal, and The Herald of Christian Science that are specifically designed to help realize the healing results we’re looking for, explaining and correcting common misconceptions about practicing Christian Science.

Forty years ago, a movie came out called Whose Life Is It Anyway? It was about a sculptor who had been diagnosed as permanently paralyzed and wanted to die. As the movie’s title suggests, we often speak and think about our life as though it’s something that belongs to us. From that perspective, life is a thing: It can be smooth or rough; it can be short or long; it can be given or taken away. 

But the Hebrew Scriptures speak of God as our life. Moses told the Israelites, “The Lord thy God . . . is thy life, and the length of thy days” (Deuteronomy 30:20). The profound spiritual thinker Mary Baker Eddy writes in her magnum opus, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Mortals have a very imperfect sense of the spiritual man and of the infinite range of his thought. To him belongs eternal Life” (p. 258). To be able to say that God is our life involves a radically new way of looking at ourselves—of thinking about our real identity. Then we see that life is not given or taken away by God; Life is God.