Prayer for the Gulf Oil Spill: Conference call Wednesday, July 7th at noon CDT

Spiritual resource to share: our healing solutions

Every Wednesday at noon, a group of Christian Scientists host a conference call with readings from the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy on a different topic every week. The last half of the call is open for any on the call to share their own healings and their inspiration from their study of Christian Science.

You are all welcome to join us! This is especially helpful for those who either can't get to a church on Wednesday or for those who just want to check this out for the first time and see what it is like.

Simply call 1-201-793-9022 and give the access code of 7040344, and then you are in! (If you are calling internationally, please email me first at kim@kimckorinek.com.)

It starts at 12 noon CDT (1pm EDT) and lasts one hour.

I'll be doing the readings this Wednesday which focus on our ability to find solutions to the Gulf Oil Spill. These readings give a deeper look at God's authority and show how God's authority is expressed through the honesty of each of us which increases our capacity to find healing solutions. It includes this main idea from Science and Health:

The calm strong currents of true spirituality, the manifestations of which are health, purity and self-immolation, must deepen human experience...."

Hope to see you there!




To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

what Jesus did not say

Spiritual resource to share: speaking the truth

Jesus' healings hold a never-ending fascination with me. One aspect of his healings involve his dealings with evil (or the devil). What he did say was always powerful and effective, sharp and dismissive.

But as I was reading, it also occurred to me what Jesus did NOT say in these types of healings. And this gave me some insight into looking at how subtle and silly our arguments with the devil can be! For instance, this story:

Luke Chapter 4: 33-37 (From The Message)

In the meeting place that day there was a man demonically disturbed. He screamed, "Ho! What business do you have here with us, Jesus? Nazarene! I know what you're up to. You're the Holy One of God and you've come to destroy us!"
Jesus shut him up: "Quiet! Get out of him!" The demonic spirit threw the man down in front of them all and left. The demon didn't hurt him.
That set everyone back on their heels, whispering and wondering, "What's going on here? Someone whose words make things happen? Someone who orders demonic spirits to get out and they go?" Jesus was the talk of the town.

So Jesus said less than five words. What Jesus didn't say was:

• Why are you attacking this man?
• Did he not study enough? Is he weak and vulnerable? Did he do something wrong?
• Why are these demons doing all these bad things? The world is going bad!

So the demon obviously recognized Jesus' authority. What Jesus didn't say was:

• Thank you for recognizing who I am. I am trying to be the Holy One of God as best I can.
• Why are you challenging my authority? Do I need to be more convincing?
• Thank you for recognizing my authority. Would it be all right if you didn't hurt this man so much?

Jesus' authority stemmed from his unshakeable understanding of God's supreme authority and God's relation to man. His example helps us to see how we can - in MBEddy's words - "speak the Truth to every form of error" and how we can "rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man."

In our healing work, we can stop trying to figure out or accommodate the problem, and claim our dominion over evil of every type.

To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

Points to ponder: Take no prisoners

Spiritual resource to share: authority of the Christ

Be still (Mark 3:49)

Get thee behind me (Luke 4:8)

Get thee hence ( Matt 4:10)

Come out of him (Mark 9:25)

I have been giving the idea of authority a working over lately. When you are studying and learning more about the omnipresence of God and good, it doesn't leave any room for discord, dis-ease or despair.

Jesus' sharp and concise directives to evil (see above) given with such finality could only be fueled by an unquestioned sense of the authority of omnipotent Truth. I thought - this is the mind of Christ - the authority and dominion given to us by God to overcome anything unlike good.

I have to include this whole quote from Science and Health. It is such a perfect explanation of the ability of the Christ to thoroughly destroy error or evil. The paragraph heading is "divine severity":

Jesus uncovered and rebuked sin before he cast it out. Of a sick woman he said that Satan had bound her, and to Peter he said, "Thou art an offence unto me." He came teaching and showing men how to destroy sin, sickness, and death. He said of the fruitless tree, "[It] is hewn down."

It is believed by many that a certain magistrate, who lived in the time of Jesus, left this record: "His rebuke is fearful." The strong language of our Master confirms this description.

The only civil sentence which he had for error was,"Get thee behind me, Satan." Still stronger evidence that Jesus' reproof was pointed and pungent is found in his own words, — showing the necessity for such forcible utterance, when he cast out devils and healed the sick and sinning.

And this is the example we have been given to follow and "do likewise." Whoa.




To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

an enlightened look at hell

Spiritual resource to share: dominion


Perhaps you have heard this modern day parable: A little girl is running away from a big hairy monster. It follows her down streets, across bridges, through the trees. Finally, she is cornered in an alley. Frightened almost to death - she turns to the monster and asked "Wh-wh-what are you going to do?" The monster stops, furrows its brows, thinks for a moment and then says, "I don't know. This is your dream."

I thought about this story after reading an exerpt from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. Page 588 carries the definition of hell:

HELL. Mortal belief; error; lust; remorse; hatred; revenge; sin; sickness; death; suffering and self-destruction; self-imposed agony; effects of sin; that which "worketh abomination or maketh a lie."

The "self-imposed agony" was what got me thinking. Science and Health also uses "self-imposed" in this way:

The human thought must free itself from self-imposed materiality and bondage.
AND
(Written about a person healed in Christian Science) He learned that suffering and disease were the self-imposed beliefs of mortals, and not the facts of being;

Reasoning on this, I asked myself, where does the thought of disease come from? It can only be entertained in thought if I agree to give it access to my thought. The thought of disease doesn't have its own agenda. In that way, I am imposing on myself the thoughts of disease because I allow myself to let those thoughts in and I dwell on them! So this puts me in the driver's seat of my own thinking. I can determine what goes in and out of my thoughts. I can ...

Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously.

Once, when mulling over and over again a disagreement I had with an individual, I realized that I had uncomfortably created for myself a little corner of hell by entertaining less than lovely thoughts about this individual. I realized that these were totally self-imposed! Nothing in my little mental argument had anything to do with the individual as a child of God. I was making up the whole unpleasant disagreement. With that old slap of spiritual reasoning hitting me in the face, it freed me from these "mortal beliefs" and I felt at peace.

Lesson learned: the antidote to hell is a disciplined thought that stops discord, dismay, disease in their tracks! We are the ones who determine whether or not we stay in the dream of material thinking.









To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.

The serenity of ice fishing and the morality of wild animals

I’ll be upfront with the lesson learned here.
Once you dive deeper into the spiritual reality of all things, you find common ground EVERYWHERE.

I recently moved from a city/suburban life to a rural life. In the city, I needed to see large open spaces – just space enough beneath skyscrapers to see the sky would suffice on weekdays, but weekends I needed to see a sweep of prairie or a vista of ocean to feel at peace.

So, I love it here: the woods, winter, wind and sky. The cold is cold to the bone. The big empty sky is expansive, the wind brings inspiration and here you see life constantly renewing itself. Here it is easy to be inspired and let my ideas and my writing flow.

However, I wasn’t prepared for the culture of fishing and hunting. This is BIG here (this is only news to those who live beyond a 500 mile radius from here). The economy, the music, the kids’ school attendance – all are effected by hunting and fishing. For some it is their sport, for others, it is how they have enough to eat. For me, I just didn’t get it.

I am fortunate to be living close to relatives who love hunting and fishing. Already my younger son is jumping at the gun (so to speak) to learn how to shoot rifles and to have my brother-in-law take him out this hunting season.

My sister-in-law explains to me that she wants to teach me the serenity of ice-fishing. Here, she explains, you are out in this wide-open space filled with stillness. Everything is white, cold and silent. Even through the hole in the ice, the slow rare sites of the movements of fish keep pace with a forzen rhythm. The peace and the time alone are nourishing. The earth, though still asleep, continues to yield bountifully.

My husband’s uncle is a big deer hunter. He, along with his lifelong wife, are good hearted and practical people. He says he will never hunt bear, however, because bear mate for life. Although this leads me to speculate about the morality of deer, it is surprising that he would take a bear's monogamy as a criteria for hunting. It speaks of our connection to all living things, of our ability to help create a balance in the life and death of wildlife, and of our personal connection and identification with wild animals.

In the Bible in Genesis 1, verse 26, indicates that God has given man dominion over the earth. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes,

"Man, made in His (God’s) likeness, possesses and reflects God’s dominion over all the earth."

This is not about domination over the earth, but God’s dominion – a loving, life preserving responsibility to care for the earth.

It is this loving caretaking, the appreciation of nature and the careful knowledge of the wilderness that I can embrace. I don’t know if I will ever hunt or fish, but I can feel at home with those who do.

Later,

Kim

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