A few Application GEMs for MAY 1st to turn past mistakes into “blessing(s) in disguise!”
Let God Expressed Meekly/Mightily in you sparkle brightly with insights from Cobbey Crisler
as found in The Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson on
“Everlasting Punishment”
for May 1, 2022
(Cobbey’s insights are shared with the blessing of Janet Crisler janetcrisler7@gmail.com)
by Warren Huff, CedarS Executive Director Emeritus, warren@cedarscamps.org
TURN PAST MISTAKES INTO “BLESSING(S) IN DISGUISE!” BE HUMBLY EVER-READY TO MAKE WISE, LOVING ADAPTATIONS that always bring DIVINE BESTOWALS!
[Warren Huff & Geith Plimmer, CS on citation S5, Science & Health, 13:2]
[Warren:] “I will always cherish my time in the mid-1970s as a church lecture committee host for Geith Plimmer, a Christian Science Practitioner and Lecturer from Great Britain. In one of his very Bible-based, Christian Science lectures, Geith commented on this sentence in Science and Health “Love is impartial and universal in its adaptations and bestowals.” (SH 13:2-3, citation S5) He said something like, “individuals and organizations will only be ready to receive divine BESTOWALS when they are ready to make wise, loving and divinely-directed ADAPTATIONS. Humility and love are the keys to the letting go of limiting circumstances and of humanly-outlined outcomes. We need to open up a willingness to let “Thy will be done” and to humbly make appropriate adaptations so that all we do is “characterized” by “wisdom, economy and brotherly love.”
[Warren:] “A need to make adaptations seem to imply that we can make mistakes with lasting bad results even when we are striving wholeheartedly for good. But we are blessed to be students of the Bible and so to know that no mistakes can really be made when we love God with all our hearts and put all we do in His hands. As Saint Paul declares as one of the rules by which we operate: “And we know that ALL things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” (Rom. 8:28, caps & emphasis added)
TUNE-IN TODAY, May 1st at 2pm Pacific Time (4-5pm Central), when at the end of Arden Wood’s Annual Meeting, I will share in my INSPIRATIONAL TALK A DETAILED EXAMPLE ABOUT MAKING AN ADAPTATION TO CORRECT A “MISTAKE” THAT RESULTED IN A WONDERFUL BESTOWAL OF BLESSINGS. We all now “see the past (“mistake”) through wisdom’s eyes, as a blessing in disguise.” (You can read & hear this verse & Desiree Goyette’s whole, inspiring solo, “Let It Go,” at https://desireegoyette.com/track/2585018/let-it-go )
HOPE YOU CAN “ZOOM” IN LATER TODAY (OR LATER TO THE ARDEN WOOD WEBSITE FOR A REPLAY) TO GET SPECIFIC TAKE-AWAYS OF APPLICATION IDEAS TO TURN ALL PAST MISTAKES INTO BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE! Click here to to register or go to ardenwood.org
SILENCE DIVISIVENESS! Think without STRIFE!
PRAY for our DIVINE SENSE of ONENESS to INCREASE!
As May arrives and CedarS gets ready to welcome our “finest of the wheat” staff to prepare for our “best summer yet,” it’s very fitting & needed that our Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson contains what Jesus was trained to pray to begin each day (and what all Jews still are supposed to pray to begin as well as end each day). Jews call this key prayer of theirs the “Shema” – the Hebrew word for “Hear”— because Deuteronomy 6:4/citation B7 starts with that word.
4 Hear, O Israel: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (citation B1/Deut. 6:4, 5)
[The rest of the Shema prayer… ] 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” Deuteronomy 6:4-9, (NIV), verses 6-9 after citation B71
Please note how constantly throughout each day (as yellow-highlighted above) Jews are supposed to prayerfully affirm the supremacy of God’s oneness and commandments to rule over all!
It’s helpfully significant that this key “Shema” prayer of oneness dovetails with CedarS 2022 theme of “Unity” – which was subsequently announced as the theme of the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Mother Church. The value of unity/oneness is a powerful, healing keynote to focus on throughout each day. Our united prayers and actions will be especially helpful in the coming weeks and months as the world emerges from the pandemic and hopefully from an escalation of the terrorism and atrocities of wars in Ukraine, the Middle East or wherever it raises its ugly head.
As Christie Hanzlik, CS, pointed out in a paragraph of a CedarS Met for a previous Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson: “It is tempting to see a world consisting of millions of human opinions, warring media reports, racial strife, class warfare, tribalism, gender inequity, political personalities, family disagreements and even conflicts within ourselves. The singular answer to this seeming divisiveness is the oneness of Truth, the oneness of good, the oneness of God. God is indivisible. And therefore we, as the outcome of God, are also indivisible.”
Verse 3 of Christian Science Hymn 157 calls for us to make daily progress in demonstrating unity: “Day by day the understanding / Of our oneness shall increase.” This prayer request to God for oneness comes from no other than Jesus in the final hours before he allows himself to be captured for crucifixion, when he prayed for his disciples and us that we may feel at one with God and with one another! (John 17:11, 21, 22)
Christian Science Hymn 157
“Jesus’ prayer for all his brethren: / Father, that they may be one, / Echoes down through all the ages, / Nor prayed he for these alone / But for all, that through all time / God’s will be done.
One the Mind and Life of all things, / For we live in God alone; / One the Love whose ever-presence / Blesses all and injures none. / Safe within this Love we find all / being one.
Day by day the understanding / Of our oneness shall increase, / Till among all men and nations / Warfare shall forever cease, / So God’s children all shall dwell / in joy and peace.
(Christian Science Hymnal, No. 157:1–3)
DO WHATEVER IS NECESSARY TO BRING A FRIEND TO CHRIST’S FORGIVENESS AND GOOD CHEER! LIKE JESUS, RECOGNIZE AND UTILIZE THE HEALING VALUE OF GOOD CHEER AND FORGIVENESS! Cobbey Crisler on Matthew 9:2-8 (B19):
[W. Luke 5:18-25 has the same healing described this week in Matthew 9:2-8 (citation B19), except Luke records how the paralyzed man’s friends got him through the crowd by tearing off the roof and lowering him to Jesus to experience this remarkable healing.]
[Cobbey:] “Matthew 9, Verse 2: ‘We have a man in bed with the palsy.” Can you imagine Jesus going by a man who had been that long without moving and telling him to “be of good cheer”? But there’s nothing Jesus said that he didn’t discern was needed. What that man needed, more than physical movement, was to be of good cheer. Jesus said, “Thy sins be forgiven thee.” Jesus knew at a glance the whole history of a case.”
(Verse 3). The scribes say, “This man blasphemes.” In order to get the healing, he has to eliminate the theological obstruction to healing first.
(Verse 5). He says, “What is easier? To say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?”
(Verse 6). “Because the Son of man does have power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy), Arise, take up thy bed, and he goes.”
“The Book of Matthew, A Tax Collector’s Account, Auditing the Master,” by B. Cobbey Crisler**
