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Application GEMs of Life Examples of the All-Newness of God’s making!
Let God Expressed Meekly/Mightily in you sparkle brightly with new insights from Cobbey Crisler & others as inspired by The Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson on
“Life”
for July 11- July 17, 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
HERE & NOW “BE IN CHRIST” — LET GO OF “FORMER” FABLES & “MAKE ALL THINGS NEW!” (Rev. 21:4, 5, Golden Text & cit. B20 + II Cor. 5:17, cit. B12) – FIND FRESH WAYS & NEW SONGS of SPIRITUAL SENSE, TO EXPERIENCE “a NEW HEAVEN and NEW EARTH”
Christie Hanzlik, CS, bought out in yesterday’s after-breakfast Prac(titioner) Talk (7-12-22) at CedarS that the idea of God making all things new was not only the theme of the Golden Text, but also of this week’s Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson on “Life.” In the Lesson the words “new” or “newness” are used twenty-some times! Christie evoked great audience response by asking for a “fist bump” every time she said the word “new.”
She showed us how a pencil in a glass of water looks bent and how that new view, shared by a practitioner friend when she was six led to her first healing.
We closed by singing Hymn 218, “O Life that maketh all things new…” as well as with Christie’s assignment to do something new today!
To hear this Prac Talk click on the play icon on black Listen bar on the online webpage version at https://cedarscamps.org/inspiration/article/7-12-22-prac-talk-by-christie-hanzlik-cs-on-the-unity-of-doing-something-new-today/
When we fully embrace Life’s forever newness as outlined in the Bible Lesson this week, you and I will fully expect fun, fresh ways for God to supply answers to our every need. We and our lives will “Sing unto God a new song.” (Psalm 98:1, cit. B13) even “…a new song in … praise unto our God.” (Psalm 40:3, cit. B5)
As our lives sing with new manifestations of “infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss,” (SH 481) all their supposed opposites will naturally be ruled out of us thereby enabling us to overcome: every lie of limitation; every seemingly enslaving habit; every thought of inharmony, division and strife; and every unhappiness arising from disappointed human will.
And, what a relief to know that it’s by God’s will and “amazing grace”— not by any of our own efforts, other than that of leaning on God — that we are given lives “big with blessings.” As Mary Baker Eddy has proven and promised: “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings” (SH vii:1) What could be bigger blessings for us than daily demonstrations that the newness of Life in God is ALL-inclusive: “Behold, I make all things new!” (Revelation 21:5, Golden Text).
CALL UPON THE LORD. NOW! LET GOD BE YOUR ROCK! IT WILL NEVER BE IN VAIN!
CedarS campers, staff and families love it when all or part of what we call “The Rock Song” is in the Bible Lesson because it reminds us of a favorite CedarS camp song by that name. Key part of this song are found in Psalm 18:3 (citation B3) of this week’s Bible Lesson. You may want to see a video with the traditional CedarS motions along with the audio as found in Psalms 18:3 and 46, cit. B3. If so, there’s a link below to Stephen Hanlin, a CedarS counselor and a CedarS 365 Hymn Sing leader, doing the motions while singing “the Rock Song” (in a round for 44 seconds). Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/238522559504897/videos/382837602949483
“The Rock Song” was also selected by former CedarS counselor, Erin Williams, for “CedarS Round-the-Clock” Trilogy of CDs that she put together as a campership benefit project for CedarS 50th anniversary summer of 2011. Erin sang and played the prelude and opening hymn for CedarS June 7, 2020 Zoom Hymn Sing. You can hear Erin leading this call-and-response song by clicking on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPHaT93Uob4
(You can click thru any transitional webpage and “browse” YouTube.)
IF UNFAIRLY TREATED, LIKE JOSEPH, CHERISH “pure affection, blessing … (your) enemies” (SH 589) And, If YOUR LOVE MEETS “NO RESPONSE”, REMAIN LOVING like JESUS did in GETHSEMANE (SH 586:23). FIND COMFORT knowing that “… to them who love God… ALL things work together for good…”— even when it doesn’t look it.
[An A.P. (Answered Prayer) History application idea from Warren Huff:]
Have you ever been bullied or treated unfairly?
Joseph (and I) sure were treated unfairly in mean ways that looked very bad, but which resulted in great good. (You can read in Genesis 37-50, partly in citations B6 and B7, how Joseph’s mistreatment by his brothers and Potiphar’s wife, all turned out to bless him and his family— and even saved him, them and many others from starvation.)
No matter what bad things happened TO Joseph – and no matter what bad things happen TO you and TO me, we can, like Joseph, declare that they are happening FOR us. With God being good and totally FOR us as well as in charge of our lives and of those around us, we, like Joseph, can refuse to be discouraged and can keep living to give, seeking to bless those around us, even those who seem to be our enemies.
I was able to overcome inharmony and unjust bullying in my first workplace (other than CedarS) by using Joseph’s example and Mary Baker Eddy’s spiritual definition for Joseph as found in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. It reads in part: “JOSEPH. … pure affection blessing its enemies.”— page 589:20)
My situation was that the owner of TEAM One Architects in Kansas City who hired me for my first job after graduating from Princeton University, made a big deal of my Ivy League training – which caused a good bit of jealousy and hostility from my immediate job supervisor. Not only did he assign me all the most meaningless and tedious jobs to do, but he also took aggressive actions to make my work look bad before our mutual employer. (In days before CAD (Computer Assisted Drafting) this took form first in his smearing my pencil lettering and later in poking a hole with a drafting triangle in what I’d been working on all day.)
I tried not to react, but rather respond with love and prayer. On my drive home after his most aggressive attack, I started to really pray the “Daily Prayer” — line by line, idea by idea. (Church Manual 41) When I got to the part which reads “rule out of ME all sin,” I realized that although the healing seemed to be needed in someone other than me, the solution to this and really to every problem needed to take place in me, in my thought and in my loving response.
In addition to using Joseph as a role model, I naturally looked to Jesus –our supreme role model. After all, Jesus had overcome hatred, injustice and persecution in their harshest forms. In the Garden of Gethsemane, when he’d been captured and was being led away to be unjustly tried, whipped, tortured and crucified, I recalled his example of healing the cut-off ear of one who was leading him away to this awful experience. When I got home I looked up the spiritual definition of Gethsemane in the Glossary chapter of “… the Key to the Scriptures.” The application idea in this definition that stood out to me to use in my situation was “love meeting no response, but still remaining love.” (SH 586:23-25)
I determined to follow Jesus’ example and be loving no matter the response. The next day started out no differently, except that during a work break, my persecutor suddenly realized and said out loud that it was his wedding anniversary and that he not only had no card or gift, but that by mistake he’d left his wallet inside his car at the repair shop and so he had no way to shop for anything during the upcoming lunch hour. Because of my prayers and desire to remain loving and to bless even my so-called my enemies, I quickly said, “Here are the keys to my Opel GT and my credit card to borrow to buy whatever is needed.” From then on, we became best of friends both in and out of the office. We waterskied often behind his boat and played Frisbee or racquetball almost daily in the park, discussed Science & Health and its Christian, Biblical principles, went together to Christian Science lectures… What cannot love do, for “Love never fails!” (1st Corinthians 13:8)
Take a minute to pray about how you intend to use love to heal any and all inharmony in your cabin, in your workplace, in your home, and in our country and world. Don’t hesitate to give past challenges your best “retroactive treatments” to release all involved from a past, present or future of wrongdoing. Instead, see them and yourself as always loving and by nature eager to bless. Try pledging to have – as your own – that mind of Christ that keeps the following Beatitudes daily.
Pledge to:
Be free from pride (poor in spirit):
Be quick to forgive (merciful): and to
Think without strife (from CedarS song) and to Win without a fight (a peace maker) …
FOR NEWFOUND FREEDOM KNOW THE TRUTH ABOUT ALL LIES — EVEN AN 18-YEAR OLD ONE!
Cobbey Crisler insight on citation B11/ Luke 13:11-17:
[Cobbey:] “A woman with spinal difficulty is in a synagogue. Notice that Luke doesn’t say she has an infirmity. Luke, who is reputed to have been a physician, doesn’t even diagnose it as an infirmity but as a ‘spirit of infirmity,’ a sense of infirmity, a concept, a spirit, a thought. ‘She was bowed together. She couldn’t lift up herself.’
Verse 12. Jesus comes and announces to womanhood something that could be applicable in many ways, not just this one time. ‘Woman, you are free from thine infirmity.’ Verse 13. ‘She’s made straight and glorifies God.’
Verse 14. (& beyond, outside the Lesson) Incredible, ‘the ruler of the synagogue’ in which this grand healing and correction in thought occurred ‘answered with indignation’.
Jesus’ explanation about the cause of disease is Verse 16. No longer should there be any room in Christian thought that disease stems from God or is God’s will when Jesus attributes it directly to anything that would oppose God. Only what would oppose God could impose something on man that God Himself never created in His whole man. Is this a new theology? Satan and disease linked, and not God as the cause of loss, or pain, or sickness?
Because if it is, Jesus defines Satan as a liar in John (8:44). Satan has bound this woman with an infirmity that has her bent over, and has accomplished this for 18 years (Luke 13:16). And Satan is ‘a liar and the father of it.’ Satan’s works must be lies as well. If they are, they can be corrected mentally, by a full recognition of what is true. Notice that Satan does the binding. Jesus said (John 8:32), ‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’
It’s a contest between the truth and the lie about God and His theology, about man, about woman, about children and about disease. If Satan is a liar, he will never change his character. Our idea of God may have gone haywire, but God has never moved.”
“The Gospels, Volume Three, Luke the Researcher,” by B. Cobbey Crisler**
LIKE JESUS, WHEN SIMULTANEOUS PROBLEMS ARISE, PRIORITIZE THE NOWNESS AND NEWNESS OF RECEPTIVITY AND HEALING OVER RANK.
Cobbey Crisler on Jesus dealing with time management of 2 urgent appeals (Matthew 9:18, 19, 23-26/cit. B16, and Mark 5:21-42 & Luke 8:41-55)
[Cobbey on the Luke version of this healing “double-header”:] “In this case we have something that might present a problem. Two people that need attention simultaneously. What do you do?… Here’s how Jesus deals with it. He is first summoned by a ruler of the synagogue with a great deal of human priority. Jairus has the rank and he asks first. He’s got a more urgent need. His daughter is on the verge of dying (Luke 8:41 or already dead in the Matthew 9:18 version). But Jesus can’t even get to the location where this girl is because of the crush of people in the narrow lanes of the Palestinian villages. The Greek word for “thronged” is often used to describe how close these groups got to one another. Jesus was nearly suffocated by the crowd.
“Later the disciples rebuked Jesus, in Verse 45, for asking “Who touched me?” To them it was ridiculous. Everybody was touching him. The Greek verb that’s used is a verb that means what happens to grain kernels between two grinding stones. They were ground really together. The people were that crowded.
“What happens? The woman does not wish to delay Jesus’ mission, but she is at the absolutely desperate end of a rope. Here we find the receptivity. Blessed are those who are in this state. Happy are those because the state of mind can be changed.
“This radical change of thought was in the presence of the Christ-correction that Jesus was exercising in the mental realm. It’s going to be sufficient and the woman feels that it will help her. She’s lost all her money on physicians. [No health insurance…] Mark even tells us that she’s worse because of that choice. [Mark 5:26] All she does is touch the border of his garment. The issue of blood, the continuous hemorrhaging that had occurred for twelve years had kept her out of the temple, kept her out of worship and made her as unclean as the lepers. With all sorts of legislative rules around her, she herself could not be touched because it would make the individual who did it unclean. But we find that Jesus welcomed that dear woman from the standpoint of God’s welcome, because he said, “the Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the father do.” (John 5:19).
“In Luke 8, Verse 48 he calls that lady, “Daughter.” Whose daughter? Certainly, not his. In fact, he lifts that word “daughter” entirely out of any sense of blood relationship. That was the woman’s problem. He lifts even her identity out of blood.
“Daughter, be of good comfort” (Verse 48). Look at how he’s addressing the thought of that woman. Not only the precious relationship to God, but the comfort. She hasn’t experienced that in twelve years. She’d lost all her money. She was about to be thrown on the society. There was nowhere to go when you were thrown on society. That may have happened to the woman who had been a sinner. Prostitution was the only open career for many women when they were simply thrown out and discarded from normal humanity. She could not get a living unless her family supported her, and there is no indication of that happening.
“Jesus refuses to allow that woman to walk away from the scene thinking that physical contact with his robe had anything to do with the healing. He says, again, “Your faith hath made you whole.” The word “whole” and the word “heal” in Anglo-Saxon have the identical root. It implies that disease is something less than wholeness, that it is a fragmentation of our being. Healing is the condition of being made whole.
“We understand that equation when Jesus said, “If your eye be single” Matthew 6:22), indivisible, not shared, no divisions in it and no double vision. It is single-mindedness and persistency, as we see Jesus requiring later in our book, which results in man being whole as God views him.
IN THIS WEEK’S BIBLE LESSON (cit. B16, Matthew 9:23-26):
In the other half of the time-crunch demand for healing, Christ’s uses humor to clear-out funerial thought:
[Cobbey:] “When Jesus goes to the raising of Jairus’ daughter, we don’t find any reason to bemoan the delay in getting there. Even though the news comes back that the daughter has died in the meantime (in Luke 8:49 or that she died before Jairus came to get Jesus’ to raise her in the Matthew 9:18 version, cit. B16). That is the human news. Jesus goes right in and clears the environment out (Verse 51). Notice, again, this must be telling us something about what is required in order to heal.
“The thought of death is so weighted down with its inevitability and grief that Jesus has to clear it out. Notice how he does so, incisively and brilliantly. He couldn’t clear them out while they were weeping. That was acceptable at a funeral. Jesus would have occupied the villain’s role.
“So, he simply tells them something that was an absolute fact to him, “That maid, right there that you see horizontal, no movement, no breath, no pulse, no anything, that little girl, she’s really not dead. That appearance that you see there is like sleep (Verse 52). And I am going to awaken her life.” All the paid mourners who were earning their salary for conducting a funeral service, and everybody else who had witnessed the tragedy associated with this little girl passing away laughed (Verse 53).
“Can you clear laughers out of funerals? There is certainly more justification from a social standpoint than with weepers. It also showed how deeply their grief had run. Forgetting every reason why they were there, they turned to laughing him to scorn. He put them all out.
“He went to the little girl, “Maid arise” (Verse 54). “Her spirit came again, she arose straightway” (Verse 55). And that beautiful practicality of Jesus, “Give her meat,” give her something to eat (Verse 55). What else would a twelve-year-old girl want anyway? It was also an announcement that everything was quite normal.”
“Luke, the Researcher,” by B. Cobbey Crisler**
