My grandmother was born in the early 1900s. When we were children, she would regale us with tales of long ago. As a girl she had never traveled far from her village and had never been in an automobile. Motorcars scared her, as they were noisy and belched smoke, and she would always flee at the sight of one.

One day she was heading home carrying a heavy woven basket full of groceries attached to a head strap and resting on her back—a common way women carry loads in Africa. The driver of a passing truck recognized her, stopped his truck, and offered to give her a ride home. Grandma was both excited and nervous, as it would be the first automobile ride of her life. She climbed into the back of the truck, and it started moving.

It was only after going some distance that the driver noticed Grandma standing and still carrying her heavy load. He stopped the truck and went to the back and showed Grandma how to sit and put her load down. He carefully explained that by giving her a lift, he wanted to allow her to rest—the truck would still carry her load without any extra help on her part!

Whenever Grandma told this story, we would always roll with laughter. But she was not just recounting tales for our amusement. There was a moral to the story. She would explain to us that God was like that truck, in that once we called on Him we did not need to continue to carry our burdens along the way.

With better understanding I have come to see her story as a metaphor of how we perceive God and our relation to Him. God is the only power, is present everywhere, and has all knowledge. He does not require material means to be Himself.

There is an African saying that an elephant is never unable to carry its tusks. Even though the tusks may look too big or heavy to us, they are not so to the elephant. It is in the same way inconceivable that the truck would have been able to carry Grandma, yet need her help bearing the load.

Would it not also be ridiculous to think God, who made everything, would need some help along the way? The Creator is never unable to provide for His creation. Being always present, He is guiding, guarding, and providing for all His creation, and thus leaves no one out. We do not have to have a special need to communicate with God. We do not inform Him of our experience through some great pomp and ceremony, as He is not a distant potentate.

I knew we could allow God to “carry the load” and trust that we would be led.

One particular incident has helped show me that God’s presence extends even to our daily lives, and that His power sustains us and carries our seeming burdens.

About ten years ago, shortly after I started teaching Sunday School, our Christian Science branch church began taking in, on Sundays, a large group of street children who were living at a rehabilitation center in town. At this time, because of the political situation in the country and the almost-collapsed economy, there were tens of thousands of children who lived in the streets of Nairobi, either because they were orphaned or had run away from their homes. Among the children who attended Sunday School was a boy of eight years, who would arrive some one or two hours before all of us and leave after we had gone home.

Our Sunday School is actually the Christian Science Reading Room, which is converted for the purpose of instruction on Sunday mornings. The young boy would help our caretaker set up the room before and after Sunday School. I was curious why he would not come and go with the rest of the children. It was then he confided to me that he did not come from the rehabilitation home—he was an orphan and lived at the park opposite our church, begging for a living. He knew some of the street kids, and seeing them welcome at our church had reasoned it would not be a bad place for him, too.

My first thought was that the boy would be helped by material intervention. But after discussing the situation with the other Sunday School teachers, I knew we could allow God to “carry the load” and trust that we would be led to care for him in the best way. We decided to help the boy through Christian Science. He showed much eagerness in learning about spirituality. We would teach him about simple concepts like home, shelter, love, and help him learn the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm in the local Swahili language, since he did not speak English.

About three months later, he came one Sunday morning clean and dressed in a new set of clothes. After the service he informed me a couple had adopted him! He was staying with them, and they also took him to school—a thing he never had the opportunity to do before.

In my delight I asked him how it had happened. He calmly told me that he had just been putting into practice what we used to discuss at Sunday School. We didn’t discuss exactly how he’d met the couple, but he told me he had caught a glimpse of how God saw him, and this led to wonderful results.

The Bible tells us in its beginning that God gave us the wonderful gift of dominion over the whole earth (see Gen. 1:26). My understanding of dominion is He did not give us control of things “out there,” but of our thinking. We always have the choice of what to take into our thinking. It is not about positive thinking versus negative thinking—it is about seeing a situation as God sees it, as opposed to with our own limited perspective. This is what enables us to leave our burdens—whether we are struggling with sickness, lack, or other issues—to the power of God. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “The truth shall make you free” (John 8:32)!

Grandma had the profound realization it was the truck, not her, doing the work. In the same way, we can prove that it is God alone who does the healing work in our lives.