London commuters regularly hear the public service announcement “See it. Say it. Sorted.” This is a message of assurance—if something disturbing is going on, you can call the British Transport Police to come and sort it out.

It occurred to me recently that we might believe that this is also how prayer works. We see that we have a problem. We go to God in prayer to tell Him about it. Then we expect God to sort it out for us. 

But Christian Science gives us insight into praying from the standpoint that, in God’s view, everything is already “sorted.” This kind of prayer recognizes that our need isn’t to have God fix our problem by turning the experience we seem to be undergoing into a better one; it is instead to yield what we are seeing and are convinced is true to what God, Spirit, knows, which is the spiritual and the only real. As we do this, we see that we are not mortals at the mercy of conditions beyond our control, but rather citizens of God’s kingdom, completely under God’s control, which never wavers and is 100 percent benign.