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A world driven by good values

Recognizing that we are all capable of living up to our God-given goodness and integrity equips us to see and experience that goodness more consistently.

  • By Randal Craft

Christian Science Perspective audio edition
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Values – the topic is mentioned quite a bit these days. For instance, a local car repair garage advertises competency and honesty. A nationwide organization promotes such values as stability, unity, humanity, excellence. This international publication, The Christian Science Monitor, highlights the values that motivate people and nations and are behind various news events.

And why is values such a hot topic? Maybe the world today is looking to build hope and trust amid suffering and inharmony. The good qualities we express toward others can naturally help to further the expression of love, respect, and trust in return. Values such as honesty, integrity, justice, and fairness promote the advancement of healing and resolution of conflict.

Christian Science teaches that good qualities inherently belong to man – that is, to everyone, including you and me, as God’s spiritual offspring. That’s because God, our divine Parent, created us in His image – “very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, conveys the significant point that man can only possess qualities that come from God. In her book “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” she defines man in part as “that which has not a single quality underived from Deity” (p. 475). God being entirely good, our God-derived qualities must also be good. And as Christ Jesus proved, recognizing the inherent goodness we all have as God’s children has a healing effect.

I had occasion to put these ideas into practice some time ago when my iPod Shuffle was stolen from a locker I was using. I’ve found prayer very helpful in all kinds of situations, so it felt natural to pray to God. My prayers affirmed that dishonesty was not truly a part of the individual who had taken the item. That person, like all of us, is a beloved child of God, and so in truth possesses only Godlike qualities and values, such as holiness, integrity, and kindness.

Ultimately, my prayers helped me realize that everyone, including this individual, has the innate capacity to do what’s right. God is our true Parent, the source of all our abilities and qualities, and could never cause us to sin.

The iPod had a number of Christian Science articles and hymns on it that meant so much to me. How could I ever lose that wonderful, Christly inspiration? I realized that I never could. God communicates truth and love to all of us, without measure.

I visited the lost and found desk a couple of times, to no avail. Yet I continued to affirm in prayer man’s inherent principled and good nature as a child of God.

One day, it came to me to inquire again. I described the iPod, and the employee at the desk looked in a drawer, pulled something out, and asked, “Is this yours?” It was my iPod and earbuds, intact and working properly. What joy and gratitude for God I felt!

Each of us can acknowledge – and demonstrate through our own thoughts and actions – man’s inherent good nature as God’s beloved, spiritual offspring. In this way, we can do our part in contributing to a world driven by good values.

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Dear Reader,

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.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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