When college exam time was drawing near, I began to feel overloaded. I could no longer review my class notes—my head really hurt, and I needed to lie down to feel comfortable.

When the situation got worse, I realized I needed to take a stand. As a student of Christian Science, I naturally turned to God in prayer. I based my prayer on “the scientific statement of being” found in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. I knew that this statement contains unerring and irreversible truths about my real identity as a child of God. The first line of “the scientific statement of being” says this: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter” (p. 468).

Since matter has no intelligence, it cannot act or react of its own accord, and it can never touch anyone’s real being. God is All, and what He manifests—in other words, qualities such as goodness, peace, strength, energy—is continuously expressed in each one of us. Man, the idea of God, can never be tired or overloaded because the divine energies are renewed every day. They are ours every moment. We are never separated from our spiritual identity.