God-given opportunities are yours

Everyone wants to be happy, to see their practical needs met, and to enjoy realized purpose. Yet, today many people feel under fire. In some cases they are literally in a war zone. In other cases, it’s because of health, housing, or education limitations, often seeming too complex and long-standing to solve.

As a student of Christian Science, I’ve learned that the opportunity to live freely and make progress is God’s plan for every man, woman, and child. God is the one, infinitely good Father-Mother who has loved each one of us into being. More than ever, these times call for unselfish prayer to realize that goodness is normal and provable for everyone.

That’s because we are each created to express the “producing, governing, divine Principle” – as the discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy describes God in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (p. 81). The divine Principle does not fail to create opportunities for its ideas to be productive.

According to the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible, God has created man in His likeness. God is the infinitely good, creative Mind or Spirit, always present, always acting to love and bless every idea created – so it makes sense that we already include whatever is needed to make progress.

Solutions appear when our thinking aligns with God, whose divine law is the giver of all good. We experience blessings, adapted to our own needs, when we discern the everywhere presence of divine Mind.

How? Christ Jesus taught us to know God, and living and thinking on the basis of this Christly knowledge expands our experience and can heal physical difficulties as well as threats to life purpose.

In my case, as I realized that individual interests, talents, integrity, intelligence, and love of good are created by God, I saw and began to trust that opportunity and individual progress go hand in hand. Wouldn’t it be natural and right that an infinite, principled Mind, providing every good quality that we each have, would also supply the necessary opportunities to express those God-derived qualities? Of course!

We can always start thinking from the nature of a good God as the only cause of our being – from what divine Love itself is and does. Infinite Love wouldn’t create an individual with the intelligence to recognize and desire good, yet not provide the opportunity for the practical appearance of that good.

Realizing that God has created each person to thrive negates nagging discouragement and hopelessness, eliminates the tendency to lean on personal, limited resources, and lifts off the feeling of being stymied when it comes to our life purpose.

I’ve been freed from that stymied feeling in various ways. For example, I’ve loved music in many forms since childhood. As I’ve prayed to live God’s love better, pianos that I couldn’t afford have come to me three times in remarkable ways. Needed income for our family came through musical opportunities offered to me, although I was not a professional musician.

On one occasion, a teaching position in a secondary school was very troublesome. Although our family needed the money, I prayed for several months to hear Mind’s direction in relation to whether resigning was the right way forward. As I persistently set aside personal motivations, I finally gained a deep confidence that God would naturally cause the right opportunity for me going forward.

That week I was offered another position. It paid much less than the job I had, a serious concern for our family’s finances. But I continued to pray to acknowledge that the Mind that governs all surely had only good planned for me and my family; I felt deeply that God’s provision was more real than fear of a missed or weakened opportunity.

That same week I was also offered a musical position on the weekends that exactly matched the monetary reduction of the new job. Opportunities for both doing what I loved and having the needed funds were provided.

It grounds our trust to realize that divine Love, in its intelligent governing of every one of us, gives us uniquely tailored opportunities to express goodness. We are created to thrive.

Adapted from an article published in the Nov. 21, 2022, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.