My husband and I were spending a week at a beautiful lakefront home with friends who were fellow students of Christian Science. The weather was beautiful, the location stunning, the friendships genuine. However, I found myself troubled by difficult family relationships. And although I was praying and studying the weekly Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly, I was not applying the spiritual facts to the family situation. 

About four days into our week together, I went into the kitchen to rinse a small cooler in the sink. Someone had left two large kitchen knives and two paring knives pointing up in the silverware basket of the dish drainer at the counter’s edge. In an instant, the cooler bumped the drainer and the knives came tumbling down on my bare leg. I dropped the cooler in the sink, put my hands over a bleeding cut in my leg and shouted, “This is not happening!” 

This wasn’t a shout of dismay, but a declaration of truth related to a thought that I had been praying with: If God is good and provides only good for all of us as His creation, then all of the bad that had appeared to be part of my life had to be completely rejected as in any way a part of my past, present, or future—or perceived lack of a future! Nothing that was wrong belonged to God or to me as His creation.