“What is God to you?”

“Love is the Father, who is strong in His care for His children and provides for every need.  Love feeds, clothes, and shelters every one of his dear ones. Love is a Mother tenderly brooding over Her children.  This Mother guards each one from harm, nourishes, holds close to Herself, and carefully leads along the upward way.  Love is a Shepherd who goes forth into the darkness of the night, into the storm and wind, to find the lost sheep.  This Shepherd of Love leaves the beaten path, searches the wood and marsh, pushes aside the branches, and seeks until the last is found; then He places it within His bosom and returns to heal and restore.”  --Mary Baker Eddy--

Eternal life also is to know God, and God is love.  This is Christ’s own definition.  Ponder it.  “This is, life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.”  Love must be eternal.  It is what God is.  On the last analysis, then, love is life.  Love never faileth, and life never faileth, so long as there is love.  That is the philosophy of what Paul is showing us; the reason why in the nature of things love should be the supreme thing – because it is going to last; because in the nature of things it is eternal life.

– Love The Greatest Thing in the World by Henry Drummond (1851-1897)--

ON A HOT SUMMER EVENING,

The Bible, I Corinthians 13 --

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not charity [love],
I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all
knowledge; and though I have faith, so that I could remove mountains, and
have not love, I am nothing.

Love never faileth ...














while grossing a street, my father was hit by an electric streetcar.  Unconscious, he was taken to a hospital and placed in an emergency ward.  My family was contacted and told that he was so badly hurt we shouldn’t expect him to survive.

I imagined my father being hit and thrown a distance, and it made me shudder.  I started to struggle with fear, and the doctor’s diagnosis.

My study of Christian Science, however, had taught me how to effectively deal with fear—to recognize it as simply a belief in the absence of God, good.  Therefore its testimony is false, never reliable or trustworthy.  I knew that what I could trust was God’s power, His constant presence, His care for all.

As I held to these powerful ideas, an angel message came to me: “Well, fearing for your father’s life is no use to him or to you.  Fear is a temptation to distract you from seeing more clearly that man has his life in God, because God is man’s Life.”  Reassured, and spiritually strengthened, I firmly put those fears behind me!  I knew too well that fear has no existence or power of its own except what we give it by ruminating and worrying.

My thought came more in harmony with God as I prayed, and I gained the gentle assurance that He preserves His own.  This comforted me, and I turned wholeheartedly to the fatherhood of Love—to the strength and tenderness of God’s might.  A line from Science and Health was a ray of light to me: “Tenderness accompanies all the might imparted by Spirit” (p. 514).  I asked myself, “Is there a greater tenderness than that expressed in the works and words of Christ Jesus, who reflected the fatherhood of God?”  He said, “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you” (John 15:7).

Then I reasoned, to have the Christ “abide in me,” meant turning confidently to the Christ, Truth, where spiritual sense discerns the true nature of man—as the creation, the likeness, of an infinitely loving God.  I also knew that praying meant to let the word of Truth live within me—to steadfastly keep my thoughts within Truth, and apply what Truth revealed to me about my father.  As I did, I caught a glimpse of how Love tenderly cradles its beloved child.  It revealed an immense spiritual force in my father’s life, overruling the laws of physicality, and confirming indisputably his wholeness and completeness.

A deep sense of gratitude filled my heart for all that God’s presence means in the lives of each of us, and how this divine presence infuses us with Christ-like love, expressed in true compassion for others, and so heals.

Shortly thereafter, we received the good news that my father’s condition had changed, and the awful predictions were canceled.  He soon returned home and resumed a normal life.

--An excerpt from an article written by Eva-Maria Hogrefe, C. S., 
published in The Christian Science Journal, April 2010—

GOD.  The great I AM; the all-knowing, 
all-seeing, all-acting, 
all-wise, all-loving, and eternal Principle;
Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence. 


--Science and Health, p. 587--

GOD IS LOVE -- AND LOVE IS LIFE!