"Thine is the power"

Barbara Thayer Sibley

Exam time at college seemed very tense, and I began to be apprehensive about my ability to pass all my exams. To add to the discomfort, I noticed that my best-prepared friends, in order to protect themselves from the thought that "pride goes before a fall," kept expressing excessive gloom and predicting their failure

But just before exams started, during a chapel service, that whole sense of campus tension was dispelled for me as we repeated the last statement of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever."^{Matt. 6:13;} There was the answer. I thought:

"Thine is the kingdom in which I work." That took care of the atmosphere on campus.

"Thine is the power with which I work." That took care of a false sense of personal responsibility or of personal ineptitude.

"Thine is the glory when the work is done." That took care of the superstition that to expect to do well was vainglory.

Examinations went smoothly—my grades were satisfactory.

From then on, this application of the Lord's Prayer became a special touchstone to me. I expressed thanks for it in church and relied on it in solitude.

Then a testimony appeared in a Christian Science periodical in which the same wording was quoted as contributing to a healing. Grateful for that, I decided that when I became a more experienced Scientist I'd write an article based on what I had come to consider "my idea." But years passed, and someone else wrote the article using the identical thought. Amazed, I forgot entirely the touchstone, "Thine is," and reacted with dismay—"But that was my idea."

The rebuke to self-justification was prompt in coming, and reproof brought another awakening. At a Wednesday evening testimony meeting the opening hymn gave me direction:

Eternal Mind the Potter is,
And thought th' eternal clay. Christian Science Hymnal, No. 52;

And when the selections from Science and Health were read, there was the reminder by Mrs. Eddy: "We can have but one Mind, if that one is infinite."^{Science and Health, p. 469;} So no true idea could be a "my" idea even if no one else appeared to have expressed it before. In this case, however, someone had expressed it before me, and there it was in the final hymn that evening—a verse that I had never previously been aware of. I sang it with awe:

God works in us to will,
He works in us to do;
His is the power by which we act,
His be the glory too. Hymnal, No. 354 .

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