Threat of Lawsuit and False Accusations Stopped Through Prayer

I am inspired to give this testimony after hearing someone share their experience a few weeks ago about handling a robbery incident while working at a Christian Science Reading Room.

Early in my career as a lawyer, I had been entrusted as an escrow agent to hold certain trade secrets for a new technology, pending a sale from the inventor to a company purchasing them. As it turned out and unbeknownst to me at the time, a close friend of my former boss, who I’ll call John, had unsuccessfully tried to buy the trade secrets from the inventor. I knew John to be a ruthless competitor. But as a young man at the time, I found him to be very charming, strong, and fearless, and I aspired to be like him.

However, a couple months after I had been entrusted with the trade secrets, John started demanding that I hand them over to him. Of course, I told him I couldn’t do that. It was such an absurd request, and it made me angry. I didn’t find John so charming anymore. Now, I started to think of him as a bad guy. I was inundated with emails from John and his attorney, who was a former prosecutor. It seemed he was trying to extort me with a threat of criminal prosecution. At first, I didn’t take it seriously because I hadn’t done anything wrong, but soon it became clear he was working up an elaborate narrative to claim that I had somehow defrauded him in his bid for the trade secrets (when in fact I had no idea he had even made an offer). The situation had become an absolute nightmare.

So, I turned to Christian Science. However, my anger was tuning me away from the angel thoughts that had guided me so often throughout my life, as I thought of John as a demon who needed to be cast out. Of course, it wouldn’t help for me to see him as something other than a child of God. I was literally demonizing him. Once I overcame that falsehood, I was led to see John as a perfect expression of God who was merely under the influence of erroneous thinking – just as I had been in my view of him!

One of the passages I read in Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy is on p. 571, which says, “Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you.” This hit me like a bolt of lightning. It was clear to me that I needed to replace my angry thoughts about John with actually loving him as a perfect expression of God. At first, I didn’t know how to do this, but I was led by angel thoughts to consider his path in life with empathy and seek the good in him. I started thinking about his moments of generosity I had witnessed. I recalled him once giving me advice about not allowing others to manipulate you, which was ironic at the time, but I still appreciated the advice because I believe it was sincerely given – and this small seed of gratitude would soon blossom into a truly loving view of him that remains today. I still understood he was seeking material wealth and power, but now I could see that it may have been his highest sense of right at the time. And frankly, my attraction to him in the first place was based on my own erroneous thinking about what it means to be strong and fearless. Over the course of a couple days, I was able to fully separate the erroneous human behavior from his true identity as an expression of Divine Love.

It was only a matter of days after I had reached this point of clarity and purity in my heart that I received an email from John to tell me he was moving on because this was no longer worth his time. Since that experience, I have had many occasions to clad myself in the “panoply of Love” with wonderful outcomes every time. I have found this to be the most reliable method for overcoming any form of malicious intent.