When I was growing up, money always seemed to be in short supply. There were many, many evenings when my mum had only toast for dinner because there wasn’t enough food to go around. As a child, I watched my mum, who was normally a strong, calm woman, weep because there was no money to pay for the electricity or the groceries. This left me feeling scared, as though life were always in jeopardy. I felt vulnerable to forces outside my control.

As an adult, I seemed to have brought with me from my childhood many of these fears about finances and supply. Even though I had a good job, and sometimes more than one, for many years I seemed to be always “robbing Peter to pay Paul”—shuffling money around in order to pay the most pressing bills. There came a time when my son’s school fees and the mortgage payments were more than I could manage, and I had to sell our house and move our family to a smaller place. But there still never seemed to be quite enough. 

In my study of Christian Science, I had learned that all right ideas are God’s and that God, as our divine Father-Mother, supplies all that is necessary for those ideas to come to fruition. I had also learned that supply and demand were both from the one divine Principle governing all; they were reciprocal and inseparable necessities.