An enduring source of joy, progress and renewal

Same old, same old.

Most of us will be familiar with this saying - perhaps in the context of Monday mornings with the prospect of yet another week of unchanging routines.

But does life need to be an endless round of nothing new and perhaps without hope of progress?

No!

I find a readiness to expect fresh, new insights can certainly help. A case in point was a meeting I regularly attend. Far from being the repetition of familiar ideas that some might expect, this event was filled with the spirit of hope and was joyously reaffirming, vibrantly new and richly inspiring.

This annual gathering, organised by my church, saw a worldwide attendance in person and online, including church members from across Yorkshire.

At The First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts, participants in the three-day event heard how joy, one of God’s eternal qualities, was a natural, achievable divine right for everyone. Inspired encounters, and spontaneous meetings, at the right time, made the event awesome.

This was a small part of what a life filled with love and a living church looks and feels like.

The most joyous part came with hearing how health is a demonstrable divine law - as Jesus proved - and which is still being demonstrated today. One attendee spoke of a healing of serious injuries in three days after falling from a horse. Another, told by her doctors that there was nothing more they could do for her, shared how she was healed in four days of lungs damaged by carbon monoxide poisoning. All who testified spoke of prayer that gave a better understanding of God’s ever-available, healing love, and a change of heart that brought relief and happiness.

For me this shows that a change in thought - away from the routine and patterns of “same old” thinking and toward a new or renewed understanding of God - can change lives and bring healing with the recognition that God is the enduring source of freshness and progress.

Such healings are not confined to any particular faith, location or period of time.

Calderdale, certainly, is testament to this. A recent article in this paper about the establishment of Halifax Town FC in 1911 led me to one Halifax resident, Sarah Broadhead, who had an operation for a tumour and found the condition had returned two years later. The thought of further surgery made her miserable, but then she recalled how a friend had been helped considerably by turning to Christian Science. “I naturally thought that I too could be healed,” she later wrote.

In an account published in the weekly Christian Science Sentinel in 1911, she described how she was “very grateful to God” for the healing that followed. She added: “It is impossible to express the feeling of relief and happiness which came over me then.”

Her sister, who confirmed what had happened, said that once they had decided to rely on prayer “all fear left us both”, and through “the understanding of God as given to us in Christian Science the healing was realised.”

From early last century to the present day in the Yorkshire area, healings of spinal injuries, anxiety issues, alcoholism, paralysed limbs and gas poisoning have been recorded in the Christian Science Sentinel and The Christian Science Journal. Far from nothing new, couldn’t this long record of God-centred healing bring betterment to everyone, making for better morals, better health, more fulfilling lives?

Surely then, “same old, same old” can become “new now!”

Peter Daniel

Christian Science Committee on Publication for Yorkshire