‘Who knows?’ God does.

Considering what God knows about His children offers a healing perspective – as a woman experienced when faced with recurring periods of depression years ago.

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It’s pretty common to question things – to wonder why something is happening or why something else didn’t work out. And when there’s no ready answer, our fallback is often a resigned shrug: “Who knows?”

When I was in college, this attitude was my default, especially after a couple of relationships failed. Being passively resigned to whatever transpired felt better than anguish and frustration, yet it never brought happiness.

Then I began experiencing regular periods of depression. One week I’d feel on top of things, the next I’d feel despondent and hopeless. This cycle continued for many months, and I was totally resigned to it.

Finally, something awoke in my thinking: an unwillingness to accept as normal anything that isn’t Godlike.

I recognized this mental rebellion, because I had learned in Christian Science that God and His goodness is the only reality. I’d also been taught to resist what the Bible calls “false prophets” – in this case, the storylines of speculation. These would suggest that good outcomes are at the mercy of fate, and that good is arbitrarily absent in our lives and in the world. But God, divine Spirit, is infinite, so all that truly exists is God and His creation – which includes each of us as His spiritual, good, peace-filled offspring.

That moment was a watershed for me. It made me more aware of the spiritual reality: divine goodness as actual and permanent. The heavy loads of resignation and fatalism started to give way. Soon the depression lifted, and never returned.

Our real needs – such as purpose, companionship, health – are always fulfilled by our divine creator. As dynamic, uninterrupted expressions of God, we’re never without worth, wholeness, and harmony. Pondering this has meant freedom from agonizing about things from the past or worrying over the future.

We don’t need to defeatedly wonder, “Who knows?” Instead, we can ask God in prayer how He knows His children. And what God knows, He makes known to us.

This knowledge brings healing. No question about it.

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

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But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

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