A lot of our thinking during our waking moments has to do with solving problems. Where do we turn for the answers? To the body of human knowledge to be found in various media: books, television, the computer? What you find here are all based upon the material senses. How limited and empty are the answers from this fleshly body, that opposes Spirit, or infinite Mind. Like the mythical Labyrinth, they ultimately lead to a dead end, which is the nature of mortality. We can instead turn from the problem at hand to infinite Mind in order to see the right answer!
Like Hagar (in Genesis 21), who turned from seeing her son, Ishmael, dying for lack of water in the desert. "Let me not see the death of the child," was her unutterable prayer.
An "angel of God," comforted her with the message, "fear not," and reassured her that "God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is [Emphasis added. Did God simultaneously assure Ishmael that he would live, as a result of his prayer, too?].
"Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand." This can be interpreted metaphysically as the direction to blot out the material view, and mentally rise to spiritually see Ishmael as God's reflection, immortal idea (what God sees
--Himself), not a mortal, and hold him in her consciousness of God as Life.
Then, "God opened her eyes," and she saw the water, bringing the answer to a form that Hagar could understand and feel her immediate need met, for water meant to her that her son would live!
What God knows of Himself is the "living waters," the reviving Truth, in Jeremiah 2:13, rather than the body of human knowledge summed up by the term cisterns, "...broken cisterns, that can hold no water." When I read this previous sentence over, it brings my thought to the problem of the pool in which the spent fuel rods lie in one of the nuclear plants at Fukushima, Japan. The question is whether or not the pool is cracked from the earthquake/s, causing radiation to leak into the ground. While we know that nuclear scientists and engineers are working out the problems which resulted from the initial earthquake and tsunami, I know that Christian Scientists are praying, along with other faithful, to God for the answers. Christian Science prayers are acknowledgment of what is understood as fundamental and true. Certainty is incidental to this metaphysical standpoint, which is seen to be above and beyond so-called physical laws. The answer comes to each one in the form that is both appreciable and understandable.
In her exegesis of Genesis, Mary Baker Eddy asks the question, "Was not this a revelation instead of a creation?" What God knows and reveals appears throughout the Holy Bible, beginning with Genesis and ending with the book entitled, Revelation. This is the scientific basis of the Holy Bible, which can be viewed as a scientific, as well as spiritual, tome.
It takes but one turn, for things to turn out good--turning away from finite human knowledge or reasoning--to the source of all right answers, infinite Mind. Working out a problem need not take time, but can be instant in Christian Science; what needs to be seen can come "in the twinkling of an eye!"
