Every day, all over the world, small children assert their independence by rejecting offers of help and declaring, "I can do it!"

Try to open a cereal box for them, and they pull it away so that they can attack it with both hands and what teeth they have. Try to help them go down steep stairs with two teddies, a blanket, and a sippy cup full of milk, and they say, "I can do it!" Offer to push them on the swing, and they wriggle out of reach and show just how capable they are at propelling themselves into action — sometimes by standing on the swing.

This is part of the way children naturally push themselves to grow and learn. And adults, too, tend to assert their independence and their ability to cope on their own: "I'm perfectly capable." "I wasn't born yesterday." "I've managed on my own for many years, thank you."

Yet how often do we really have to manage on our own? Most of what we do every day involves interdependence of one kind or another, including learning, shopping, traveling, or playing football. Teamwork is the most efficient and fun way to handle so many things in life.

In a much larger sense, you might even say people are designed for dependence — not on human resources or intellect or technology (useful though they are), but on the spiritual power of God. When we access this form of dependence, we become engaged in teamwork of the most exhilarating and effective kind. And God never measures, rates, or drives us to prove anything about our human ability to cope.

"There is divine authority for believing in the superiority of spiritual power over material resistance," wrote Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, and whose challenges in life led her often and unhesitatingly to the arms of God for help. Referring to the doubts expressed by the Israelites in Psalm 78, she observed: "There is to-day danger of repeating the offence of the Jews by limiting the Holy One of Israel and asking: 'Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?' What cannot God do?" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 134-135).

This line of reasoning is based on the understanding that, with God, there need be no paralysis in the face of the complexity or stiffness of a task. And certainly no anticipation of disappointment or botched attempts. There is a Science that allows us to rely on the only power that will never fail, and therefore can always be trusted — God's power.

Mrs. Eddy's discovery of this Science can be an encouragement to anyone facing challenges today. When their own world collapses, people long for something that offers hope, security, and permanence. This may seem impossible when city buses, restaurants, and even police stations are literally exploding around them. When a marriage breaks up, a job is lost, or tsunamis devastate whole countries.

But good things — things once deemed impossible — are happening every day. People are learning to love those they once hated. So-called incurable diseases are being healed through spiritual means alone. Often it's precisely at these moments that the insidious influences of fear, pride, or selfabsorption are weakened sufficiently within individuals that they become aware of and respond directly to the im pulse of a power beyond themselves — divine Love, the universal God with whom nothing is impossible.

When we allow this impulse to develop and take hold in thought, we have taken a step that enables us to benefit from this higher kind of love, and to experience its healing and restoring influence — without any lurking feeling of inadequacy or self-depreciation. It enables us to rebuild, replant, reconstruct — even in the face of devastating loss.

What is possible to God, is also possible to us, as His sons and daughters. We can do it. And we get there by discerning that there's an accessible, divine source of intelligence and ability, and by letting go of anything that persuades us that we have to do the impossible, all on our own. Humility, "the stepping-stone to a higher recognition of Deity" (Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, p. 1), leads to the right kind of dependence and to satisfying achievement. Steps of progress are undergirded by the Bible's assurance that "it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13).

Then it's much easier to conclude, "Because God can do it, I can do it!" "With God, all things are possible." That's the best teamwork of all.