Always Safe

[For young teens]

JAMAE WOLFRAM RICHARDSON

Can you be sure you'll be safe? Yes, you can.

Rick knows why, and he's experienced protection from harm. Out riding a motorcycle, he and a friend were suddenly chased by a German shepherd. To shake the dog, the boys raced down a small hill. At the end was a sharp turn. The bike skidded and then flipped, and both of them were thrown into a ditch. Rick landed in about a foot of water on his head and right shoulder, and his friend was on top of him.

"Before I really had time to check or think about it, I knew I was all right," Rick explained. "Ed couldn't move his leg, so I helped him up, but I rejected the thought that he could be injured. In just a few minutes he could walk. Aside from the mud and a few tiny scratches, we were both all right. When we went back to fish Ed's unbroken glasses out of the ditch, we were amazed to find good-sized boulders and logs all around the spot where we had landed."

How can you explain such protection?

Rick was accustomed to thinking of himself in Christian Science as a spiritual idea, inseparable from the Father, and not a vulnerable mortal. He believed the promise, "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling."^{Ps. 91:9, 10;}

To Rick's way of thinking, safety isn't a lucky break. It's the natural and inevitable result of understanding God's control over man. Rick knows how important it is to reject quickly the suggestion that man can be injured or harmed—ever outside of or separated from good. And he knows that as he understands this better he can prevent accidents from happening in his experience.

One's safety really doesn't depend on events or circumstances. It depends on his dwelling mentally in that "secret place of the most High" mentioned in the first verse of the ninety-first Psalm. When one dwells with God in thought—is consciously aware of God's all-presence and power—he abides "under the shadow of the Almighty," under God's protection and care. He sees himself and others as Mind's intelligently placed and directed ideas and knows that God's law, not chance, operates in his experience. He knows that obedience to God's law, which requires of him love and patience and mercy and justice and honesty and wisdom, inevitably brings him the protection of that law.

Many young Christian Scientists today, like Rick, are finding that their understanding of Truth protects them from harm. They know that the same Truth operates in every place and circumstance —on the streets and highways, in the skies, on the athletic field, in the jungles of Vietnam. They know that Truth was available to Christ Jesus, and it is here for us now. Theirs is a steady, quiet confidence that they can rely on this statement of Mrs. Eddy's to keep their lives progressively accident-free: "Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief and unite with the one Mind, in order to change the notion of chance to the proper sense of God's unerring direction and thus bring out harmony."^{Science and Health, p. 424.}

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