Joan Cawood has a lively faith. Her evangelical Protestant church taught her to love God and to live Christ Jesus' teaching. But in the two or three years just after college, although she was living a Christian life as best she could, she found herself in the midst of a deep spiritual struggle.

She wanted to trust God wholly and serve Him, but at times there seemed to be "a bridge missing"—a gap between what she knew of God and what she experienced of Him. At one point, although she was hard at work on her career, the yearning to be closer to God became so persistent that she decided to leave her job and look for work that would give her more time to pray and to study her Bible. In this interview she talks about the questions that troubled her and the experiences that brought her to her answer.

As a Christian, I certainly wasn't looking for a faith to replace Christianity, but for a deeper sense of God, which would help me understand and live more of Christ Jesus' original teachings. I was quite sick at the time. The real problem, though, was that deep down I felt—a little like the Apostle Paul—that I was fighting against what God meant me to be. Yet in the midst of struggle, I had intuitions of a very different sense of reality. There were times when I could just feel God's presence. Something shifted for a time; so that instead of pushing or struggling I lived in the flow of God's love.

Was this before or after you knew of Christian Science?

Before. In fact, it was just before I left my job, moved to another part of the country, and took a less demanding job so I'd have more time to study and pray. Then the first day I was in the new city I met a man who was a mathematics teacher. As I got to know him, I could tell he was a Christian by the way he lived. But he seemed very different, more one with God. This individual rarely spoke of God. But you could sense the deep spirituality that permeated his life—a buoyancy, peace, and love that seemed to draw out the best in those around him. I wanted to know what it was that made him the way he was. One day I saw a Christian Science Quarterly on his desk, and I decided to find out about Christian Science. I thought that might explain what was different about him. So I borrowed from the library a copy of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy.

I guess you could say that I glimpsed in this man's life—and in the lives of several Christian Scientists I met later—the same "original beauty of holiness" that Mrs. Eddy says she loved so dearly in the Christian ministers who taught her in her youth. ^{See Message to The Mother Church for 1901, pp. 31–35.} As I studied and worked with Science and Health, I began to find that Christian Science wasn't some heretical addition to Scripture. Rather, it opened up the Bible's teachings about spirituality and showed more of their practical and solid basis.

What do you mean?

First of all, Christian Science has given me a deeper sense of prayer—one that never includes the admission that evil is God's will. This prayer begins with the assurance that His will is always good, that it can be trusted, that it doesn't cause or sanction suffering. Before, "yielding to God" had equaled "Christian resignation"—almost a kind of martyrdom in some cases. Believing God permits sickness or war or suffering of any kind subtly undermines one's trust in God's love and one's willingness to obey. Now, yielding is agreeing with a fuller sense of God—a God who is completely Love.

As a Christian, I already sensed that spirituality was what I yearned for, but I didn't know divine law was this practical. Jesus assured us that God's kingdom really is "at hand" now. Christian Science has shown me this is a provable fact—even if uninspired human perception is blind to it. It show that God is the All and only—infinite, all-embracing—in other words really God. I am gaining a fresh understanding of the God who has been God all along.

Like Martha, or the older son in the parable of the prodigal son, I had felt committed to God, but burdened too. The older son had remained working and living in his father's house and undoubtedly loved him. But, it wasn't until his father spoke to him—"Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine" ^{Luke 15:31.} —that he began to understand more of the total goodness and grace and limitless possibilities of the father's love. Christian Science has shown me the God revealed in the Bible, without the veneer of limitations and misunderstandings we have imposed.

So what's the difference between this sense of God and that which you previously entertained?

I began to discover the God I had always worshiped and yearned to know better but couldn't fully or wholeheartedly embrace in my daily life. Earlier I felt a bridge missing. I wanted to yield my life fully to God, and yet something held me back. I felt unable fully to trust a God who I knew always could answer but who I wasn't sure always would answer—or who seemed to bring or allow very difficult times for His followers.

There always seemed to be a gap between the Biblical sense of God's complete sovereignty and goodness and my own experience of God. I became more and more aware of the aching needs of the world and very frustrated that I couldn't even consistently trust God in my own life, much less in serving others. This is why the idea of a Science of Christianity means so much to me—it made God's goodness and government real and realizable.

Could you develop this point—Christianity as a Science?

Science makes clear the fact that prayer is based is based on unvarying truths and divine law. It gives a sense of God as unvarying good, to be trusted absolutely. I had a turning point in my experience on this very idea of absolute trust.

One afternoon I was feeling slightly ill; it was really minor, but I left my office and went to another room to pray. And it suddenly occurred to me that trusting God for this need was really an encouragement to discipleship and a wonderful gift. The challenge was really a little thing, but that was why the gift was so wonderful. I saw that everything gives you an opportunity to trust God more. Trusting God for every little thing lets you know God more, and as you know God more, every little thing transforms you. And that's what you are looking for as a Christian, a way to be a better disciple in the everyday things.

I realized that the demand of Science—to rely on God, to be obedient to God in every area of life—helped one trust more fully rather than compartmentalize one's faith by applying it to some things and not others. It made Christian discipleship more concrete. I saw that true healing could not be separated from obedience—that all flows from this growing love for God and recognition of man's oneness with Him. It's looking at a bigger view of God and striving to hold on obedience to that. This unlimited view of God began to transform my whole outlook.

How did it transform your outlook?

For one thing, it gradually transformed my sense of man. It's still transforming it! When you see God as limitless, you start feeling less limited. You start appealing to a God—and even companioning with a God—who loves and acts out of the total goodness that He is. You feel closer to God and glimpse more of what it means to be the child of God right now. And how to express this spirituality in practical ways.

I remember one evening when a friend shared a healing of a sprained ankle he'd just had. I wasn't particularly surprised. I had seen a number of wonderful healings in response to prayer over the years. But what did surprise me was his quiet certainty that we can expect God to heal because it is in keeping with His very nature. I had been sick for several years, but maybe, just maybe—although my friend's certainty confused and angered me a bit at the time—God could be like this.

In the next few months I read and reread the Bible and Science and Health as if I'd never read them before, trying to discover what God was actually like.

For the most part, I was so absorbed in this "new world" that was opening up that I forgot about the sickness. Sometime in June that year—nine months after I'd started studying Science and Health—I had to go through a series of medical tests. They showed what I'd already gradually begun to accept: I was indeed absolutely whole with no trace of the previous difficulties. But the more lasting change has been an expanding sense of God's presence and goodness. A sense that He could and would free me and everyone who turned to Him.

Now, I find myself more willing to face difficult things as I see that God didn't bring them. Difficulties come not from God, but from resistance to the basic fact that God's kingdom is here and is good.

I'm also less willing to accept limits from the past that try to carry over into the present—temperament, heredity, and so on. Accepting this Science of Christianity is not a one-time decision but an ongoing quest! You start asking God about who you are and who He is. You question everything you had assumed was true in light of what the Bible says actually is true.

Where do you find the answers?

In the Bible. Studying Science and Health has helped me to go back to the Gospel itself, and I see both the questions and the answers in a new light. You realize that as you get to know God, it is not just history—"His-story"—or biography, it can be your story too. I'm beginning to see that through this transformation, through redemption, this becomes our autobiography to the degree we accept our spiritual heritage.

You don't mean to be claiming equality with Jesus, do you?

No, not at all. It's similar to what Mrs. Eddy expresses when she speaks of "...not claiming equality with, but growing into, that altitude of Mind which was in Christ Jesus." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 255.} This gives more meaning to Jesus' life. It makes more of his sacrifice and gives an ongoing sense of it. It shows the tremendous consequences of his life in what happens to our lives as we become real disciples. I really feel closer to Jesus by not putting his example so far beyond reach that it becomes impossible to follow. His instruction—"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" ^{Matt. 5:48.} —no longer seems a futile burden as one glimpses one's inseparability from God. We can begin to walk where he walked.

How much of this do you feel is really possible today, given the tremendous materialistic and secular currents of our time?

That seems to be a crucial question right now. This Science of Christianity really meets materialism head on. It shows that realizing Christian promises isn't dependent on outer circumstances but on having the Mind of Christ. It brings fresh insight into what the whole Bible really means. Science and Health states, "The central fact of the Bible is the superiority of spiritual over physical power." ^{Science and Health, p. 131.} It's tremendously freeing to glimpse that we can begin to realize the Bible promises about the ultimate triumph over materialism now.

And many people are already yearning for and receiving more spiritual light. As we follow God, Truth, where He leads us, we don't have to fear that we'll be misled.