Show me infinity!
A friend of mine was on a waitlist for subsidized housing for several years. When a place became available she was delighted – until she saw how tiny that particular unit was! But if she didn’t take it, she’d lose her place on the list.
I offered to design a potential room arrangement. But when I diagrammed the apartment and my friend’s furniture, fitting her modest belongings in the apartment looked geometrically impossible. It was hard to picture the space feeling like home or a place where loved ones could gather. And for a moment, I succumbed to the sadness that was hanging over the move in general.
So I opened my heart to God. The prayer that came to me was “God, show me infinity.”
Our identity – which includes our sense of home and purpose and right activity – is a concept. A concept can’t be restricted or squeezed into a physical space of any size. In the Bible, the Apostle Paul, a follower of Christ Jesus, preached that “we live, and move, and have our being” in God (Acts 17:28). God, Spirit, is infinite. So where we live is infinite. Our expression of God-given individuality is unconfined.
Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, studied the Bible, especially the words and works of Jesus. From this she came to understand that the infinity of God is a practical spiritual fact operating in our daily lives. She writes in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” “The finite must yield to the infinite” (p. 256).
And it does! As I prayed to see the infinity of God, good, in operation, solutions started to come. Over the next few weeks, ideas developed for how that tiny apartment could accommodate bookshelves, rocking chairs, and family treasures – with room to spare for friends to gather and play their fiddles together.
Our homes, our lives, and our prayers don’t have to be big. They just have to be ... infinite.
Adapted from the July 7, 2020, Christian Science Daily Lift podcast.
