“Love is the first step on safe ground”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Association assignment. While I have nothing conventional to share, I have helped two friends in ways I do not believe I could have without the recent lessons I’ve learned in Christian Science.

One is a friend who recently moved back to Boston after losing everything in the real estate crash. She had finally found a great job after years of unemployment. Then all of a sudden, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and everything seemed lost again. The family is very close, and she sees her mother as the head of the household.

She asked me to pray, not being aware that I was a Christian Scientist. I told her I was, and that we know how to pray! And I have been praying as best I can. I told her that my prayer was, “Nothing can break the love between you and your mother, nothing can interrupt its flow, and you know that your love for your mother is real. Your mother gets the same unbreakable Love from God, who will not let her go, any more that you would leave her bedside.”

I also helped my friend contact a lawyer who has helped with the legal issues. Her new employers have allowed her to keep her job while working remotely from the hospital and home. On the morning when her mother was about to undergo a very complex surgery, I happened to call my friend, and again she asked me to pray. The surgery was successful in reducing her mother’s pain and now she is in rehab. While my friend has been working out much of this on her own, I think at least a little of it is due to my work and prayer and the order they always provide in chaotic circumstances.

The second opportunity came with another friend, whose husband passed on several years ago. Since then, she has been struggling with drinking. She called me one morning, around the time of the anniversary of his death. She was very drunk, passing out several times. Finally she told me she had lined up the pills and was going to “end it all now.”

What a tailor-made challenge this phone call was! Now, one thing that Science does like nothing else is cut through the picture before it and put things on a reasonable footing. She is not a Christian Scientist and would not hear any Science at all. But from my own recent experiences, I know that healing is the result of knowing Science rather than speaking of it. I was able to unsee the situation with complete conviction—I was completely unimpressed. Then I heard the phone drop and she was out again.

She called back in less than a minute and was able to talk lucidly and say she would be OK. I told her that the anniversary of her husband’s death did not deserve the attention she was giving it. Then I told her that she couldn’t really kill herself anyway, because the friend that I know could never be contained in a body (she’s a little flamboyant). She told me she loved me. That made me happy—not just because she’s a friend, but because I know from experience that love is the first step on safe ground, taking us out of the mess we think we are in. Last I talked to her she was getting her hair done.