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“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me”
Have you ever wondered about the last line of the twenty-third Psalm? I have. I wondered why it is phrased, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” Why would goodness and mercy follow us? Wouldn’t we want it to go before us, paving the way? What came to me was how this could be understood in reference to our personal history.
From the perspective of the physical senses, our past can often appear troubled. But when we instead rely on spiritual sense, we find that our only true history is spiritual and good. Where God’s goodness and mercy follow us, there is no sad past to dog our footsteps. And relying on spiritual sense has a renewing and health-giving effect, leading us to find healing in our present experience. Then we realize that only God’s goodness, love, bounty, joy, and harmony have ever truly followed us.
Writing of her own history, which included, at times, heartbreak, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, concludes, “It is well to know, dear reader, that our material, mortal history is but the record of dreams, not of man’s real existence, and the dream has no place in the Science of being” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 21). She adds, “The human history needs to be revised, and the material record expunged” (p. 22).
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