There is wisdom in the remark that one should be dissatisfied enough to improve, but satisfied enough to be happy. True satisfaction comes through the understanding of the spiritual and joyous condition of man, God's perfect child. Mary Baker Eddy writes in her Message to The Mother Church for 1902 (p.17), "Happiness consists in being and in doing good; only what God gives, and what we give ourselves and others through His tenure, confers happiness: conscious worth satisfies the hungry heart, and nothing else can." Satisfaction is gained with each yielding of human will to divine rule. Such yielding lifts human thought step by step to the recognition of the worth of man in God's sight.

Some people are dissatisfied because they are tired of waiting for the world to give them a chance to use their talents. But there is no need to wait. The world's want is apparent if we have eyes to see. Each Christian Scientist can start with the spiritual truth of God and man and use it in his immediate experience.

A schoolteacher who had been healed through Christian Science of a large wen on her wrist was driving with a friend one day when the conversation drifted to what they were going to do with their vacations. The friend remarked that she was going to use hers to have an operation to remove a painful lump on her wrist. The Scientist remembered her own healing gratefully and wished that her friend too had Christian Science to help her.

There is very little adventure to a wish, and this passive thinking did not satisfy her. She awoke to the presence of an opportunity to put into practice what she knew. Her dissatisfaction with evil brought her to a higher point of view. She said very little to the friend, but she acknowledged that man is well, free; that evil is never true, no matter where it is seen or felt. This she found was an awakening experience for herself.

She pondered the allness of God and the spiritual condition of man as God's expression, rejoicing all the way in what spiritual vision comprehended as now true. Two days later the friend was startled to find the lump gone. And she properly attributed it to the right thinking of the Scientist.

Why not be satisfied with good, and dissatisfied enough with the claim of evil to discard it? Jesus was satisfied with his true nature as God's Son. At the start of his ministry, before he had risen to his final demonstration of God's law, he had heard the voice of Truth saying (Matt. 3:17), "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." He was, however, dissatisfied with the ills and distresses of mankind that confronted him, and he made full use of his every opportunity to improve what needed improving in human thought and hence in human experience. We have the same opportunity to increase our satisfaction with the spiritual reality of man as God's perfect son, and to overcome all the evil that contradicts this understanding.

We can start with the basic postulate of Christian Science, namely, that God is All and that man is God's creation, whole and complete, made after His likeness, possessing dominion derived from His perfect nature. We start with this divine postulate because nothing is made good or perfect by human thought. Never does God become better or man more His image through human improvement.

Dissatisfaction with evil is always warranted. Evil is untrue. Only good is true; only God's creation is evidenced in man's experience now. Demonstration is always based on Principle and its spiritual effect. Christian Scientists demonstrate God's law of love, His infinitude of right ideas, in the healing of every distress that faces mortal thought.

We learn through Christian Science to be satisfied with the way things are in the kingdom of spiritual reality. Jesus spoke of the realm of good as within man, and Isaiah said (30:15,16), "In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not. But ye said, No; for we will flee upon horses." The strength of human thinking is in its quiet assurance of spiritual reality, its confident acknowledgment that this reality is demonstrable when it is accepted as the present and only condition of man. Mortal mind, being dissatisfied with itself, wants to make changes in that which it conceives of as reality, but which is only illusion; it wants to go somewhere and do something, but it has one power only, that is to destroy itself.

To find spiritual satisfaction and overcome the reasons for dissatisfaction we pray. "Prayer," our Leader says (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 2), "cannot change the Science of being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it." Prayer is an awakening experience for human thought, an active human desire to know God's will and to do it. Prayer is not a creative force. But through prayer we prove what is true of man, and we are satisfied.

We learn to love spiritual reality and to understand the unreality of all that contradicts Christ Jesus' edict of perfection (Matt. 5:48), "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." We do not make God good or man perfect through prayer. We pray because we are dissatisfied with mortality and seek a higher rule and a holier purpose than can be found in the world of physical sense.

Thus our continued aim under the direction of Christian Science is to gain the understanding of God's presence that unfolds sinless being, made in His likeness. The familiar words of the Psalmist sing out their blessed message (Ps.17:15), "I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness."