We hear much these days about working or praying for the world—and indeed we should. The very heart of Christianity is unselfed love and a broader vision. And there's no question that the world needs our support and spiritual uplifting. But we can sometimes get so busy focusing on the world and thinking about others' problems that we inadvertently neglect our own necessary prayerful work for ourselves, and our responsibilities to those closest to us, especially our families.

In order to help in solving the world's problems we must always match our focus on others with our own gaining of self-knowledge and self-control. If we fail to do this, much of our work may simply be counterproductive or wasted.

Do other people's sins bother us more than our own?—or at least grab more of our attention? If so, that is a sure sign of being out of focus. Each individual's primary responsibility to God necessarily begins with himself and his own actions. Our interaction with others, even our responsibilities to family, are really a function or extension of our own demonstration of spiritual self-knowledge and self-control.

Mrs. Eddy once said, as a student recalled, "When you see sin in others, know that you have it in yourself and become repentant." ^{Quoted in Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), p. 83 .} Isn't that parallel to the point Christ Jesus made in the Sermon on the Mount: "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ... Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." ^{Matt. 7:3,5.}

The teachings of Christian Science—the Science of Christianity—never advocate ignoring the evil in the world, or simply withdrawing from it selfishly. Christian Science teaches just the opposite. It reminds us constantly of our Christian duty to think and act unselfishly, and for the common good. We fight for good as the only reality. We support it wherever it appears. But the main battlefield for each one of us is our own individual consciousness and actions. And the primary—indeed the only— battle is never against people, but against evil itself.

If we successfully wage this battle within our own gates, we will be led by God to say and do the right things with our fellowman, and to support the right causes in a most effective way. And we will use every encounter with the evil we see in the world to uncover and condemn the underlying impersonal evil, making sure that our own thoughts and lives lend it neither active support nor acquiescence. Whether we are praying specifically for someone who has requested it, or for the world at large, we must never fail to sweep our own consciousness clean. That is a responsibility on which God will never let us renege.

Christian Science reveals the sine-qua-non role that individual consciousness plays in the scheme of things. Man is individual and self-governing because, as the spiritual manifestation of the one God, he reflects God's individuality and self-government. True individuality distinctly expresses the complete spectrum of God's essence and qualities. Since man, then, is individual, the most effective manner in which to destroy the illusion of evil and to uncover good is to focus on the role of individual consciousness—the root of all human actions and conditions.

Mortal thought doesn't comprehend this fact. It focuses instead on plurality and belittles man's individuality. It tends to see power and importance in terms of quantities, not in qualities. Rejecting the spiritual sense of man as God's image, this material sense suggests polytheism (many gods) and pantheism (a homogenized god who is the amalgam of nature and all things). But it is impossible to raise the standards or conditions of the world in a meaningful way when working from such a limited and incorrect standpoint.

Absolute monotheism as taught by the Bible and the writings of Mrs. Eddy (one infinite God, including His infinite manifestation, or expression) does enable us to rise above false, material limitations and conditions. Growing in the recognition of the individuality of God and man, we find our outlook deepening in everything we do—including our study of Christian Science.

Take, for example, Jesus' parable of the wise and foolish virgins waiting for the bridegroom. ^{See Matt. 25:1-13 .} How often in reading it do we identify ourselves and others as either wise virgins or foolish, instead of identifying the wise and foolish elements in each one's consciousness, and then doing something to reject those thoughts and beliefs that are foolish?

What about the many verses in the Bible that read like these from Psalms: "Quicken me, O Lord, for thy name's sake .... And of thy mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy all them that afflict my soul"? ^{Ps. 143:11,12.} Do we simply picture the good guys versus the bad guys when we read this (probably under most circumstances identifying with the good guy doing the praying)? Or do we recognize that our only enemy is impersonal material-mindedness in all its counterfeit phases, and that our first duty is to neutralize those enemies within our own consciousness? Mrs. Eddy asks: "Can you see an enemy, except you first formulate this enemy and then look upon the object of your own conception?" ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 8.} Further on she adds, "Even in belief you have but one (that, not in reality), and this one enemy is yourself—your erroneous belief that you have enemies; that evil is real; that aught but good exists in Science." ^{Ibid., p. 10.}

All the teachings of Christian Science point us to this underlying issue: the working out of our own salvation as we are admonished in Philippians. ^{See Phil. 2:12 .} We don't ever actually do someone else's work for him—indeed we can't. We can do it with him, as we do when we pray for a patient asking for metaphysical help, or for the world. But even then we are really only doing our own work as required by God, and that is ridding our own thought of false belief. Working out our own salvation enables us to go beyond the mortal, pluralistic sense of things and keep pace with our own larger lessons. This in turn helps us to "read" more accurately what is really going on in the world, and to play a healing role.

A Christian Scientist's focus may well be on the world, but the doorstep of his own consciousness and action will never be left out of the picture.