In an age of communications designed to make our jaws drop, there’s a simple statement that many people would consider much more jaw-dropping. It’s in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the textbook of Christian Science by Mary Baker Eddy. She writes, “There is no power apart from God” (p. 228).

What an uplifting thought! Yet with the many unresolved problems in our lives and communities and on the global stage, to claim that God, good, has all power might seem like heresy to human logic. We might find every fiber of our being protesting, “How can this be, with all that’s going on in the world?” Maybe we feel such a claim lacks empathy or compassion for those affected by ill health, war, natural disasters, political oppression, or poverty.

But the conviction that it is material sources—from bacteria to forces of nature to political authority—that hold sway over us makes disease, destruction, and abuses of power inevitable. Isn’t it worth investigating the possibility that all might belongs to a God who is wholly beneficent and always present?