 "And a woman who had been suffering from a hemorrhage for twelve years, came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His cloak, for she was saying to herself, “If I only touch His garment, I will get well.”
But Jesus turning and seeing her said, “Daughter, take courage; your faith has made you well.” At once the woman was made well."
(Matthew 9:20-22 NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE)
 I was out on an early morning run. It was a tough one. I was huffing and puffing heavily, when I usually run with great ease. And I watched as my thought lapsed into a familiar pattern …
1) to blame myself or my training for a difficult run, “What did I do wrong?”
2) to start recalculating my training to avoid future bad runs. “What do I need to change or avoid the next time?”
Then I realized that running, like all activity, is more than just a physical event. Life and its action aren’t brain, bone, muscle, and lung function. Life is God, omnipresent, powerful vitality. Life is expressed throughout God’s creation in the joy of being and doing. Running is an outlet, an outward expression of this joy.
I was measuring my success as a runner by whether I was having an easy or a tough day. If it was easy, I attributed that to good training. If difficult, I must have been doing something wrong.
The fact is, as a reflection of divine Life, I am a good runner – a full reflection of the vitality of divine Life – even if I don’t ever put my running shoes on. And so are you. But the joy of being an expression of Life impels us to demonstrate that joy and get up and move.
 Tough days, whether in running or any other aspect of daily experience, aren’t a statement about one’s goodness. The degree of difficulty in doing something doesn’t tell us anything about divine Life. Tough days, like tough runs, simply reflect the general resistance on any given day to the fact that the God is Life and Life is Spirit and is reflected spiritually – not in matter. In running, for example, tough days are about resistance, not about the effectiveness (or goodness) of the runner. In other words, resistance (any backward, downward, material drag) is not personal.
When meeting resistance, we can ask ourselves - Am I seeing myself as a a work in progress, as a mortal progressing towards spirituality? Or am I Spirit’s full reflection now, hence already spiritual? Because God’s children reflect God who is Spirit, the heat of resistance to our present spirituality isn’t personal. But it is our work to master that resistance through the understanding of what it means to be God’s reflection, on any given day.
The true and simple theology of Christ is that we are spiritual and perfect as God himself is Spirit and perfect. And we are capable of expressing our spirituality, with the freedom and vitality it includes, every single day. Christ Jesus set the standard of how to properly identify ourselves as God’s image or reflection, when he said, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)
In fact, God’s creation reflects perfect Life every moment. Pain, discomfort or fear on any given day, are simply material resistance to that fact. It isn’t personal. The resistance isn’t yours or mine. But we do have to take up the case. Our job is to keep the focus on the real Life we are living - the joy and harmony and eternity that is being expressed in us right now.
 Mary Baker Eddy explained, "Controlled by divine intelligence, man is harmonious and eternal." (Science and Health, 184)
That isn’t something we have to make happen. We are already there. This is our spiritual foundation and starting point in prayer – perfect God and perfect man.
It will be tested. But, so what? It isn’t personal. Challenges are just momentary resistance - a case to be treated and released.
We can do all things through Christ – through the understanding Christ Jesus gave of God as perfect Life, divine Spirit, and harmonious Mind. This Christ is revealing our perfection, our natural divine intelligence, which is the real controller. The Christ is telling us that we are each God’s child, harmonious and eternal – now and always.
 I expect most of us have, or have had, a habit. A habit is a settled, a regular tendency or practice. Sometimes habits are good and sometimes they are not so good. Unhealthy habits can become ingrained to the point of taking over no matter how hard we might resist. So, what can we do to overcome a bad habit? Jesus gave a good example in his parable of the prodigal son. This young man had a problem with self-indulgence and overspending. One day he hit a low point. Degraded, without funds, hungry and desperate, he had a sudden awakening. Jesus said that he “ came to himself” – that is, he woke up from self-absorbed thoughts and behaviors and sought refuge with his father. (See Luke, chapter 15) Of course, Jesus used this parable to teach an important lesson. We can all turn back to the one divine Father, to God, whose open arms welcome every repentant child and who shows a way out of the desperate corners we sometimes place ourselves in. I once had a bad habit of nail-biting. It became an annoying way of life for me. I had chewed my nails for as long as I could remember. I wasn’t hurting anyone else with this habit but I wasn’t very attractive to look at while I was gnawing away, and neither were the fingernails! When I was little, my grandfather tried to help me stop. During one visit, he put tape over my fingernails. But, undaunted, I soon chewed through the tape. During another visit, he polished my nails with an awful tasting liquid. I managed to put up with the taste and the nail biting continued.
 It wasn’t that I was deliberately trying to be disobedient. It just seemed I couldn’t help it. As I grew older, I would make attempts to defeat the problem. But, the minute I started reading a book, watching TV, or going to the movies, I would find my fingers rising to my mouth and I was chewing again. And no human will – not mine, not my grandfather’s – could stop it. The time came when I began to get serious about overcoming this habit. By then I was a grown woman with six children! But as a new student of Christian Science I realized that I could turn to prayer for problem-solving. I remembered a certain Bible verse, “Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.” (Matt. 25:21) When it came to mind, I prayed, asking God to show me at least one little thing in my life that I could be faithful over. I saw this as a way to be more in tune with God. Then I thought, “Stop the nail biting.” This message seemed to me to be guidance straight from God telling me it wasn’t necessary to be trapped with an unpleasant habit.
 I knew I couldn’t stop the nail-biting through will-power. I now saw another way. I could “come to myself” like the prodigal son and turn back to my Father. I could be faithful over what I did with my hands, as a form of mindful worship of God. In fact, I was being called on to replace an old bad habit of nail-biting, with a new and good habit of being faithful to God by waking up to my true and good self. I don’t remember much about the thought process that followed this insight, but I do remember feeling very confident that I could stop biting my nails as an act of faithfulness to God. Not long after this, I was riding in the car with my husband. I remember my fingers rising towards my mouth and then, suddenly, they stopped. I was aware of God’s palpable, gentle presence with me. God’s goodness completely enveloped me. My hand dropped into my lap – and there it stayed. The 40 year old nail biting habit ended that day. So what was that presence that enveloped me in the car? What is it that prompts one to suddenly come to oneself after indulging a bad habit for a long time? I believe it is the Christ, the divine message of God, revealing God's goodness in action and reflected in His creation. The Christ has the ability to rouse us from mindless evil to a conscious awareness of God’s present goodness and our ability it express it.
 It can be so reassuring to remember that the Christ is perpetually present. There is never a moment when we can be disconnected from divine good, never a time when we are without God’s help. Like the father in Jesus’ parable, our divine Father’s open arms are ever-ready to welcome us when we turn towards Him with a heart willing to change. Breaking bad habits involves more than an adjustment of attitude and behavior. Waking to a better sense of ourselves as God’s good creation, we can form new habits, good habits, that reflect our spiritual, liberated selfhood as children of God.
 Some days, bloggers just wake up and think, “How about taking on a subject that may kick up some dust?” This is a Finding your Prayer MOJO post. This means you can expect to find a tip or two in here to give more confidence, to support progress and to help power up your prayers. Last week, the subject was anger. Christ Jesus gave tips on cleaning anger out of our path. This week, the subject is lust. The Sermon on the Mount has a thing or two to say to us to pave the way to better health and to being an effective healer. And it all starts with thought. Matthew 5:27-30 speaks of adultery as a mental crime. “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” It isn’t enough to just watch our behavior. Our thoughts need to be clean and pure, too. Mary Baker Eddy explains in the chapter "Marriage" of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “Infidelity to the marriage covenant is the social scourge of all races, 'the pestilence that walketh in darkness, the destruction that wasteth at noonday.'" (56)
 Why such strong words? Because infidelity relates to instability and the inability to keep our word. If we can’t keep a promise to one, how can we keep a promise to anyone, especially God? She speaks also of chastity as “the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society; and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.” (ibid 57 )
Again, infidelity relates to instability and chastity to stability. That is no small thing. Chastity involves keeping a pure perspective of yourself and others. Chastity involves a commitment to oneself and to others to see everyone as spiritual. If our sense of self and of others rests on a material basis, if we see and treat others as primarily physical, sensual, sexual beings, we are on rocky, unsettled ground and unhappiness follows. To Christ Jesus, spirituality wasn’t simply a theory or a theological viewpoint, it was also a way of life. Jesus’ teachings give the opportunity to think of ourselves as more than physical. Spiritual qualities, not material, physical, sensual characteristics, comprise true identity. These spiritual qualities include, but aren’t limited to, joy, peace, tenderness, love, compassion, affection. The list goes on forever. We would do well to add to the list daily fresh insights into the spiritual nature of God’s man.
 Getting back to Jesus’ instructions, it is as important to guard against sexual feelings and activities outside the marriage covenant, as it is to guard your home against marauding intruders, because lustful thoughts are predatory. They raid purity, pirate spiritual intuition, and loot spiritual sense by reinforcing a one-dimensional, limited material sense of God’s creation.
Often the desire to find a companion gets mixed up with physical attraction. But there is a simple way to think about sex: as part of the conversation between a husband and wife. Seen in this context, the desire for sex really points to the desire for the permanent relationship of a marriage. So when thoughts of sex come, we can be clear in determining what to do with them. Are these thoughts pointing to a desire for the commitment of a marriage, to be a lifelong witness to the spiritual growth of another? Or are they sneaky, hedonistic, aggressive intruders chipping away at inspiration, productivity and restricting your worldview to materiality and sensuality? Those are the ones Jesus condemned as detrimental to wellbeing. A mere attraction to a physical body is pretty useless. It doesn’t better prepare one for a happy marriage. It can induce one to underestimate the good they have to bring to a relationship. The safest context for a couple to work out sex and sensuality questions from a spiritual basis is within the context of a marriage engagement, because they have already agreed to see each other in larger terms than simply a physical relationship.
 Even within a marriage, a spiritual perspective of one’s mate is essential to progress and spiritual practice. A pure and open look at a spouse from a spiritual perspective can do much towards nurturing the wellbeing of the couple, leading to the tender sharing of good in daily activities, including, but not limited to, sex.. Marriage, whether sex is or is not a part of the relationship, is a workshop in earth’s preparatory school. It isn’t an essential workshop. Not everyone needs to marry or to have sex. It is just one of many workshops available to us. Jesus equated lust with adultery, indicating that they are fatal to Christian healing and to Christian healers. He also gave an effective antidote to lustful thoughts: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.” No, dismemberment is NOT the Christian antidote to lust. In Scripture, eye is symbolic of discernment and hand relates to power. To me, Jesus is saying that if a material view of people dominates your thought, it will affect your behavior. Go after the material view and correct it. It is better to catch the problem while it is still a thought, than it is to let it be a further detriment to your life and productivity. And if a physical or sensual sense is pulling on you to think or act in a fashion detrimental to your healing potential, cut it off with your spiritual sense – that is, give consent to the power of the purity and goodness reflected from God at the base of your spiritual identity.
Prayer MOJO is never tough to obtain. It is often the little thought adjustments that bring out the greatest confidence (or prayer MOJO) when we pray.
| | Who remembers the commercials for Brylcream in the 1950’s? Their slogan was, “Brylcream: A little dab will do ya.” While there’s really no magic potion for effective prayer, Mary Baker Eddy wrote about the little things we can do to bring out the physical and spiritual harmony in life. So, if you are looking for some prayer MOJO today, a little dab of these will help: “ A little more grace, a motive made pure, a few truths tenderly told, a heart softened, a character subdued, a life consecrated, would restore the right action of the mental mechanism, and make manifest the movement of body and soul in accord with God.” (Miscellaneous Writings, 354) |
 “LOVE. What a word! I am in awe of it.” So wrote Mary Baker Eddy in her book, Miscellaneous Writings. (249)
She went on to exclaim: “Over what worlds on worlds it hath range and is sovereign! The un-derived, the incomparable, the infinite All of good, the alone God, is Love.” (ibid. 250)
As a human quality, love is lovely and can be deeply felt and movingly effective in harmonizing our daily round. We can fall in love, be enthralled at a baby’s smile, and be touched at the kindness of a stranger.
But, the Love that is God - the underived and infinite - is power untold. It is grand, noble, magnificent, unassailable, without an opposite. Love is the eternal Almighty.
 Love doesn’t need someone or something to bring it forth. It is not dependent on another person or a place or a special event. Love loves as the sun shines. It is what it is. It is kind, compassionate, impartial, gentle, and mighty.
I’ll never forget when I first felt the mightiness of Love many years ago. I was sitting on the edge of my bed thinking about my son when he was a toddler. Suddenly, I felt a tangible push! I was in awe. I knew it was love. I felt the push of a Love greater than the human love of a mother for her child. It was, unmistakably, God, Mother-Love, the source of my mother-love.
From the moment of that push on, I have known that there is not a single moment when I, or anyone else, is separated from the Love that is God.
On the road one day to visit a friend, I noticed a car following me. At first, I didn’t pay too much attention, but when I made a turn towards my friend’s house, I saw that the car was still behind me. I wondered if that person was going to visit my friend, too!
When I stopped, the car behind me stopped, also. A lady I had never seen before hopped out and rushed towards me. She obviously had something to say. I rolled down the car window and she started screaming. She was furious. She let me know in no uncertain terms that the first turn I made was illegal. I didn’t think so, but I told her I was sorry. She kept shouting.
 At first, I felt like dropping to the floor of the car in a puddle. Then, I began to think of the power and presence of Love - the Love that was right where road rage seemed to be. As I prayed, I thought of how Love is All, encompassing all, the totality of being. No one was excluded from love. She suddenly stopped, as if someone had turned off a faucet. There was silence. We looked at each other. Then she turned and walked slowly back to her car. I went into my friend’s house, inspired by the power of Love. Love is our real nature. Love, God is substance – the only real substance, in fact. Man - a generic term including us all as God makes us - is the image, or reflection of flawless, perfect Love. Love, God establishes and maintains everyone’s real identity. Love creates us to be balanced and clear, and a simple protest on the side of divine Love, in prayer, is enough to bring out this spiritual fact in ourselves and others. Love, God, is so powerful, that evil or hatred cannot stand in its presence. The mortal thoughts and behaviors that would try to make us feel separate from God – like anger, revenge, impatience, irritation, rage - melt at Love’s touch. No one owns love. It isn’t personal. No one has more of it than any other one. Love’s expression is what we are – all of us. Knowing this can relieve one of the struggles associated with a personal, limited or obstructed sense of love. A beautiful Psalm says, “The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted… Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” (46) Love is exalted in the earth. Right where you are, where I am, the mighty love of divine Love is perfectly reflected.
 Have you ever suffered from buried anger? Anger is often simply accepted – as if we have no choice in the matter. But that isn’t true. Anger is sin. No one is required to sin. By eliminating anger as an influence, we can expect our prayers for others to be stronger and more effective. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus introduces several different subjects with variations on the words, “You have heard…” He could well have been indicating, without judgment, that we all have heard and experienced the same things and, consequently, have similar lessons to learn. The Sermon on the Mount teaches how to address and eliminate different forms of evil - the stuff that everyone has dealt with at one time or another. One subject was anger. Jesus said, “ Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire." (Matthew 5:21-22)
 Jesus points out anger's range - from the subtle expression of annoyance, to the strongest of insults, to the full-out murder already condemned in the Ten Commandments. "Raca" was a light criticism, like a modern-day "Oh, dear", while "Thou fool" could easily result in punches being thrown and the cops being called. Notice how anger is linked with hell. We’ve all been angry, or have been the recipient of someone's anger, at one time or another. What does it feel like? Exactly. Hellfire. Once he had his listeners' attention, Jesus gave direction on when and how to cut off anger before it begins to complicate one's life. He said, “Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer..." (See ibid. 5:23-26) Trust me, it all goes downhill from there. To me, to “leave your offering at the altar” is to drop everything - every activity, interest, desire – until we have found love for our brother or sister or neighbor or enemy – until we have reconciled our brother with our understanding of divine Love. It’s totally in prayer that this can be accomplished. If not, unhealed anger would contaminate all our offerings, all our prayers, and it would strangle the joy out of life.
 Once, while praying for a healing of chronic pain, I realized that I was suffering from buried anger. Whether the offense was great or small doesn’t matter. Because of the anger, I believed that I was not worthy of being healed. The part of me holding onto anger (a mortal sense) was the same part suggesting that I was a victim of someone's cruelty. This double-barreled shotgun of anger and victimization was pointed at my heart, with fear pressing down on the trigger. The suggestion was that I could just as easily succumb to disease. I knew that when anger is released, healings often come quicker. But how could I start? Jesus’ Sermon-message on healing anger, and Mary Baker Eddy’s inspired take on his meaning, pointed the way for me.
Jesus continued in the Sermon, by saying, “Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou are in the way with him.” Mrs. Eddy explained, “Suffer no claim of sin or of sickness to grow upon the thought. Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more the author of sickness than He is of sin. You have no law of His to support the necessity either of sin or sickness, but you have divine authority for denying that necessity and healing the sick.” ( Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 390) Try reading that passage by substituting the word anger for sin. Sin is anger. And vice versa.
 The simple thought that God is no more the author of sickness than he is of anger, or even of the so-called sin that produced it, helped me see that neither anger, sin, nor sickness were personal faults. If God didn’t create them in me, I couldn’t generate or perpetuate them in myself. I followed Jesus' and Eddy’s instructions to a T. I dismissed the aggressive mental suggestion that anger was a power over which I had no control. I claimed, in prayer, my spiritual authority to stop it. And I could, you know. Letting go of anger never did depend on the behavior of anyone else. Anger and the accompanying sense of helplessness over it, was a sin that I had the right and ability to kick out of my experience at any point. I was healed of the chronic pain that very day. That was more than ten years ago. It never came back.
Anger is not a built-in. It is not a part of anyone’s nature. I am not the angry type. Neither are you or anyone else. As God’s children we are the type of God, of universal, divine Love. Praying from that angle, anger cannot tie us down.
 Want some prayer MOJO today? (MOJO is the confidence, clarity and feeling of momentum that indicates your prayers are moving you forward.) - Dump the anger. Sweep it, shovel it. Do whatever it takes, but get all of it: even the little fuzzy anger-bunnies and nearly invisible anger-webs which lurk around and cling to the dark corners of thought.
- Do it quickly! To “agree with thine adversary” isn’t to agree with evil. “Agree” is Bible vocab for “resolve it." Resolve the anger question quickly, whenever it comes up.
- Suffer no claim of anger to spread and grow in your thought. Dismiss it right now, and stay close in prayer to the conviction that anger is sin, thus illegitimate. God didn’t give it to you. You can’t have it or hold it. It is not necessary to suffer from anger. God has given you the authority to clean it out as an influence.
Let yourself be cleansed, thoroughly cleansed, of every vestige of anger today! (HEAD'S UP! Be sure to check back on Saturday to find Kay Olson's guest post on healing anger through love.)
 I love, love, LOVE my new kitchen! Fifteen days without internet connection can be very stressful for a blogger used to getting up at 3 am to post. Or not. In fact, I have slept like a baby. After a seven year search, a lot of prayer, and spiritual growth, we just purchased our first apartment in France. With the exception of the phone and internet installation, everything about the move (a whole 4 blocks away) has run like a perfectly adjusted Swiss movement watch. We haven't missed a beat. I find it hard not to see the internet pause as anything but a blessing. If access had been available, I may have felt the pull to sit in front of the computer. Instead, I took the time to unpack, settle in and enjoy our new home. Can't beat that! Telephone and internet issues aren't new to me. When I first moved from the United States to Europe in 2005, I dealt with the repeated and unexplained disconnection of my phone and high speed line. After a year of escalating problems, I had completely had it with the phone company. Had prayer been my first resort, I am sure a solution could have been found much earlier. As it was, I waited until I had exhausted all human means of dealing with the problem before finally settling down to pray about it. (Tip: Pray first!)
 Did I mention how I LOVE my new kitchen? When I did finally take it up in prayer, I thought about God as All-in-all, the only Cause, producing all real effect, and that this effect can only be good. As I considered God as divine Mind, the only intelligence of the universe, I realized I could no longer accept that French telecommunications could be disconnected from intelligence or behind the times. Since all communication is governed and controlled by Mind, these systems could only reflect the Mind that is God, the Mind of Christ. All that is real and true in human systems is governed by Mind, which gives stability, intelligence, and enlightenment to their actions. As I stopped seeing the phone company as my enemy, the frustration with it faded out. I began to pray for them. Prayer put us on the same team. Within 24 hours of this prayer, I had phone and internet. In the six years that followed, I never had another interruption of service. Today, I am sending a shout out of thanks to the members of the team. My boxes are unpacked, my paintings are hung and it looks like we have lived here for years. And the internet is now back on. Good work, guys! Your timing is perfect.
The moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.Romans 8:26-28
 This mash-up is a list of posts that particularly caught my attention this week. There are loads of good blogs out there and I love to read as many posts as I can. I plan to give you a mash-up from time to time, to introduce you to different resources, other bloggers, and more tools for the spiritual journey.
This group of blogs come from a pastor of a church in South Carolina, two Christian Science practitioners from who knows where (they don't list their location on their blogs), and a Christian Science teacher from Washington State.
 There is such balance in Christ Jesus' prayer. I see "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," as an equation of sorts. Look at AS as the equal sign. We are forgiven AS we forgive. We are free AS we free. Mary Baker Eddy summed up the perfect balance of the equation when she wrote, "And Love is reflected in love." God forgives and we forgive. God gives and we give. The divine Principle of supply includes balance. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy states, “Giving does not impoverish us, neither does withholding enrich us in the service of our Lord.” (79) In fact, the opposite is true. Giving enriches and withholding impoverishes – because if we believe that we are not in a position to give, we may be dealing with the obstructive sin of greed.
All we ever do, we do by reflection! According to Genesis 1, God's man is made in His perfect and good image and likeness. God, the great Giver, gives. Therefore we, the Giver's image, give. It’s not that God gives and we receive. That would be absorption, wouldn’t it? It would imply the need to store up, or the possibility of exhausting, our divine resources. But the Principle of giving, the Principle of supply, is God. And God's supply is reflected in us as His well-supplied creation, reflecting His giving nature. God gives and we reflect His giving, and thus the flow of good continues forever unobstructed. I believe that this sense of ceaseless giving is ultimately the divine law that is behind the Biblical concept of tithing. A tithe is not a tax. A tax could exhaust one's resources. A true and honest tithe can only come from a spiritual understanding of the abundance of what God gives. This spiritual understanding opens the door to the divine economy where divine Love meets EVERY human need in just the right way.
 Remember the disciples' role when the loaves and fish were multiplied for hungry thousands? What little they thought they had was distributed freely. In the human economy, such giving might follow the mathematical rule of subtraction. But in the divine economy, through Christ Jesus' understanding of the Principle of reflection that is God, the result was a multiplication of provisions. Loaf and fish multiplied until all were fed. And no one was left out. How many disciples distributed? Twelve. How many baskets were gathered when all the work was done? TWELVE. One scholar noted, “When all were fed, when the job was done, they gathered up twelve baskets full, one basket for each Apostle. No waste, but no stinginess. God does not starve His staff.” (Interpreter's Bible Commentary) I love that!
In the divine economy, there is no paltry return on investment. God gives and so we have an abundance to give. In simple terms, tithing is a 10 percent investment with a 90 percent return. Who can beat that in any other market? Tithing isn't limited to giving in church, although that is a good thing, too. Check out Mary Baker Eddy's inspired take on the gifts we have to give: "TITHE. Contribution; tenth part; homage; gratitude." Science and Health, 595)
 Is there any area of human life that can''t be benefited by rendering homage or reverence to God's goodness and contributing a little time, attention, prayer and other acts, with gratitude? Are you looking for some Prayer MOJO today? Seeking that sense of confidence and spiritual authority that opens your prayers to abundant good? Think about your giving - of time, of energy, of prayer, of service to family and others - even of paying your bills - not, as a burden, but rather as an investment of good, flowing from divine Good, from God, and reflected fully in you. Claim your fat and flourishing return. You are God's image and likeness. No one and nothing has more to give than you do, by perfect, flawless, unobstructed reflection.
This I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly;
and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.
Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give;
not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.
And God is able to make all grace abound toward you;
that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work:
As it is written, He hath dispersed abroad;
he hath given to the poor: his righteousness remaineth for ever.
Now he that ministereth seed to the sower both minister bread for your food,
and multiply your seed sown, and increase the fruits of your righteousness;
Being enriched in every thing to all bountifulness,
which causeth through us thanksgiving to God.
For the administration of this service not only supplieth the want of the saints,
but is abundant also by many thanksgivings unto God;
Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift.
The Apostle Paul, II Corinthians 9:6-11,14
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