“To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings.” This is how Mary Baker Eddy began her major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and I can say that this precious promise has come back to me so many times through the years that I’m a very grateful reader! Leaning on God has become the essential starting point for me in every prayer I pray.

Growing up, I found it helpful to think about “leaning on the sustaining infinite” as releasing myself from a personal sense of responsibility, moving towards a more complete trust in God. I would picture myself learning to swim, laying my head back in the water and feeling how the laws of buoyancy supported me so effortlessly and perfectly. I didn’t have to create the laws of buoyancy because they already existed. The one thing I did have to do, though, was to trust those laws and relax into them in order to swim around freely.

It seems logical to me that Science and Health begins with leaning so that readers realize no matter how little they feel they know about the spiritual laws that govern the universe, or divine Science, they can always experience healing just by surrendering more completely to those laws.

When I was a young mother, I gained much inspiration from "leaning on the sustaining infinite." One night, I was holding our newborn daughter in my arms as I rocked her in the darkness of her nursery room. I was also praying because I was feeling concern about how to financially provide for our three children. Then, I looked down at our daughter. We were done with her middle of the night feeding, but she was still wide awake and looking up at me with great trust and contentment. She was utterly helpless as far as providing for her own needs, but she seemed completely satisfied and at peace.

“This is what it means to ‘lean on the sustaining infinite’”, I thought. It’s not the kind of leaning where you do as much as you can on your own, and then if you need a little help or some rest, you lean on God. No, it’s complete surrender to your divine Parent’s care and guidance. It’s like when Jesus said, “I can of mine own self do nothing”. What a burden this lifted off my shoulders! In the coming months and years, we always had sufficient means to provide for our daughters.

At one point during my professional career, I remember having a specific healing by “leaning on the sustaining infinite.” I was preparing to give a talk at a conference in Los Angeles. All through the months of preparation, and on the plane, I’d carefully guarded the over 100 pages I would use to deliver the four hour presentation. The week before, I’d developed symptoms of a heavy cold. Through prayer, the worst of the symptoms had retreated quickly, but there was still a tickling cough that I was concerned might disrupt the talk.

Then, the night before the presentation, I headed across the street from my hotel to a restaurant for dinner. I was carrying the manuscript in a manila folder because I’d planned to go over a few last-minute things while waiting for my meal.

Halfway across the street, I tripped and the folder went up into the air. A steady sea breeze caught most of the pages and blew them down the busy boulevard! As I watched this whole scene I actually started laughing because what came to me was, “now you'll have to lean on the sustaining infinite and not yourself.” I didn’t have any idea what the solution would be--but I knew God could handle it.

Two doormen who were standing at the restaurant quickly saw my need and scurried around, gathering up the pages that they could find while I picked up those at my feet. They presented me with a disheveled stack of paper and I sat down at a table in the restaurant to repaginate the whole mess, trusting that God would help me mentally reconstruct whatever was missing. But there was no need to do this, because not one page had been lost. What was gone was a personal sense of responsibility I’d felt for the presentation, along with any concern about my cough. The next day, I was totally free from any symptoms of a cold, and well prepared to give the talk.

I’m still getting new messages of inspiration about “leaning on the sustaining infinite.” The latest came when I went on a trip to India. I was in a rickshaw behind a family of five who were all riding on one motorcycle. The mother was holding her toddler in her lap with her arm tenderly and securely across the child’s chest. As the motorcycle scooted in and out of traffic, the child remained peacefully asleep. “Now that’s leaning on the sustaining infinite” I thought.

Even if we feel like we're scooting through our days full speed ahead, God, Mother-Love, is safely caring for us. We can be so sure of this that we can feel as peaceful and restful as that little child.

Science and Health is one of those books that causes me to appreciate how every phrase is a potential source for inspiration and healing. Through many revisions of the book, Mary Baker Eddy was so deliberate and careful with the placement of every sentence. So it’s no surprise that the first sentence starts with God. Leaning on the sustaining infinite. What an amazing way to begin anything and everything!

Leaning on God:

Science and Health
vii:1-2

King James Bible
John 5:30 (to :)