Alone in the woods
At summer camp, I had the opportunity to do a solo trip. A solo is when you go into the woods near camp with a sleeping bag and spend the night by yourself, exposed to the elements.
I’d done solos before, but I’d always been relatively close to other people—just thirty or forty feet away—and trails. This time, the closest person was more than three hundred feet away, and I was in a densely forested area.
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When it began to get dark, I started to think about bears or coyotes coming along.
At first, it wasn’t too bad. But when it began to get dark, I started to think about bears or coyotes coming along. These types of thoughts are not exactly fun to sit with, especially when you’re alone, so I turned to God in prayer to feel better and calmer about sleeping outside. I have been taught in Christian Science Sunday School, and have learned from reading the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, that God is All and all good. Thinking about God this way was the start of my prayers.
Two statements from the Bible about God’s goodness comforted me: “Good and upright is the Lord” (Psalms 25:8) and “There is none good but one, that is, God” (Mark 10:18).
I also like what Mrs. Eddy says at the very beginning of Science and Health: “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings” (p. vii). To me this says that God is the sustaining infinite. So since God is All, and God is good, nothing bad could happen. God’s goodness, presence, and power sustain us forever.
How could something inherently good cause harm? It couldn’t. Knowing that, I fell peacefully asleep.
I also thought about bears and coyotes and how every creature is created by God. I know this because the Bible says: “God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:25, 26).
So God is good and created everything good, and how could something inherently good cause harm? It couldn’t. Knowing that, I fell peacefully asleep. In the morning, I was unharmed, had no insect bites, and had stayed dry.
I am so grateful for God and for the opportunity to overcome my fears through prayer and see God’s goodness.