Prayer Finds Opportunity for Goodwill

I was thinking about how, no matter where you are, there are opportunities to express love, joy, and goodwill to those around us. I had a lovely conversation with the cashier at the oil change company recently. I was waiting on my car and we struck up a conversation that eventually turned to the topic of all the tensions in the world and how everyone seemed on edge. We both shared ideas about the antidote for these problems, and I shared with her how my church stresses the importance of gratitude and how we need to train ourselves to consciously look for and acknowledge the good that is all around and to keep looking for it so we don’t get fooled into going down the rabbit hole of all the things that seem wrong and only focusing on them.  I mentioned my gratitude list—how I try to write down every big and little example of good that happens each day and credit that to God.  She loved the idea and mentioned all the things she was grateful for each day, like the extreme beauty of this area, when she was coming into work. It was a great conversation, and we both left it feeling blessed and grateful for the fact that we’d met each other.

This conversation also reminded me of an experience I had with my husband a number of years ago.  We were out running errands and shopping and were in a store where we needed one of the salespeople to do something for us.  The girl who was helping us did not seem at all interested in being helpful, and her attitude was not particularly warm or friendly; in fact, she seemed a little put out that she had to help us.  Our first instinct was to get a bit bristly and irritated at her bad attitude, but I remember thinking, “No, I’m not going down that road!  This is not her identity, and I will not acknowledge or accept anything un-God-like about her.”  Because she’d gone into a back room to get what we needed, we had a minute to work along these lines; both my husband and I had had this same thought. Well, when she returned with the item, it was like a new person had shown up.  She was cheerful and more helpful and we had a nice conversation with her as we wrapped things up with the purchase. We were struck by the about-face and so grateful that we hadn’t succumbed to the temptation to accept the initial picture or worse, to react to it. I remember in the show The Chosen when Jesus had to go defuse the problems that the Decapolis was having after Andrew and Philip unwittingly got everyone all riled up. The different factions of the city were irritated, throwing around insults and stirring the pot. But Jesus did not rise to their taunts; he didn’t react or bristle up. One of my favorite things Jesus says in the Bible is “the prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me.” (John 14:30)  To me, the “prince of this world” are the propensities that Mrs. Eddy tells us we must master—the human impulses toward the wrong side. but when we do master them, we reflect God’s healing power.

I’m so grateful for the teachings and examples of the master, Christ Jesus, which are elucidated so clearly by Mrs. Eddy and help us to master our propensities and resist the tendency to react to the prince of this world.  I’m also very grateful for how this is taught and emphasized here at Plainfield by our practitioners.