Giving Past to God Makes Way to Move Forward and Be Free

I want to express my gratitude for our beautiful lessons, especially this week’s lesson on Everlasting Punishment. I came to this church with a lot of mental baggage, and one of the heaviest weights on my consciousness was the weight of some things I deeply regretted from my past, which I had never been able to fully come to terms with or speak of to anyone due to guilt and shame.

What Christian Scientists often refer to as “animal magnetism” is the evil or negative thoughts that often come to us as that internal dialogue we have in our heads, and the message is anything but helpful or healing. Those thoughts would try to keep us from moving past our mistakes, bad decisions, etc, and progressing God-ward. They would say that we are not worthy of anything good … or even worse, these thoughts might convince us that anything bad happens because of our past sins and subsequent lack of worth. That was certainly how they came to me in my thought because it didn’t seem to matter that I’d left those sins in the past, truly regretted them, and was a completely different person – when something bad happened to me, it was tempting to believe I deserved it.

Well, that is certainly the story of the prodigal son – he’d turned his back on his Father, made some pretty bad decisions, and didn’t feel worthy of returning to his Father… at least not in the elevated position of sonship. But he humbly and repentantly returned to his Father in hopes of being accepted as a lowly servant. And here Jesus so beautifully shows us how the Father’s love and forgiveness works – that this true repentance and humility was cleansing and renewing and that his Father immediately forgave him, celebrating his return.

Recently, I heard someone say in a podcast that her pastor had told her, “If we can face it, God can fix it.” She said that ultimately, you have to call on God, and that is where the battle is decided. The divine intelligence cannot go to work unless we’re willing to face whatever it is we need to face – we have to look at it, we have to pray, and we have to ask for help. Well that also really resonated with me because it is exactly what the practitioner forced me to do – to face my past, to see that it was never a part of me, and to really understand that, as Mrs. Eddy tells us, the belief in sin is punished only so long as the belief lasts. And also that, as the Bible says, “God requireth that which is past” – so stop getting tricked into lugging the past into the present! Giving my past to God allowed me to move forward and be free of that mental bondage, to keep it from continually poisoning the present.

I am very grateful for Christian Science and how it frees us from sickness and sin, which can be so tenacious. I am so grateful for the practitioners in this church who help us  understand and live this Science more fully.