In one way or another, I’ve worked with Christian Science organizations (CSO) for a total of about 5 and a half years—not including the time I spent in my own CSO at the University of Maryland in College Park ( Go Terps!).  For the last year and a half, I’ve been working with the CSO Support team at TMC Youth.  It is a creative environment where I get to work with really interesting and highly motivated people.  I love it! (more…)

Last year the Christian Science Board of Directors came to Uruguay and met with a group of about 20 young people in Montevideo, the capital. I was there. What the five Board members said about the spiritual concept of Church and the role of young people in the church—how we can work for it and improve it—was so moving, so inspiring to me. Their comments were deep, but easy to understand. That was the first time I’d met a member of the Board. They brought Mother Church membership applications with them, and after their chat with us, I didn’t hesitate to fill one out. (more…)

When I was a senior in high school, I had the opportunity to do a three week independent project of my choice. For my project, I decided to study the Alaska native culture in depth by living and working with people from the Aleut heritage group on St. George Island, Alaska. Located above the Aleutian chain in the middle of the Bering Sea, St. George Island is secluded, predominantly indigenous, and has what some would consider minimum contact with the outside world. That being said, by doing this project I was to go completely outside of my comfort zone and leave behind everything that was familiar to me. (more…)

Years ago my husband left me at the beginning of November. Being left was sad enough, but when I realized I was going to have to go through all the holidays by myself, it felt like it was too much to bear. I called a friend of mine who is a Christian Science practitioner in tears. She surprised me by saying, “Oh Christmas, it’s either too happy or too sad.” I got the sad part, but too happy? Could Christmas—or anything—be too happy???  But as she went on, I got her point. You can get so caught up in all the preparations—the gift buying and wrapping, the decorating, the cooking, and on and on, that you completely miss what Christmas is really all about. I didn’t think so at first, but that’s worse than missing a husband! (more…)

One of my favorite things about the Christ is that it helps me understand who I am. It’s funny, but the best way for someone to find out what he or she really is like is to learn what God is like. People aren’t God, of course, but they do express God’s nature. The quality of God is the same quality of God’s spiritual creation—and spiritual creation is the true you and me. (more…)

As individual expressions of the one infinite Mind, we are each created with a specific sense of purpose and direction we are intended to pursue in our lives. For one it may be the love of creative expression, for another something completely different. Yet for each of us, it is absolutely unique and God-given.

We may start out searching for our sense of worth from the approval of others, not knowing where our true sense of satisfaction comes from. We may crave love from sources outside of the one ever-present I AM. Yet, for each of us, in one way or another we all must ultimately discover where our real sense of satisfaction comes from. (more…)

“Wait a minute!” you might be protesting. “Love myself? That sounds like self-centered, ego-tripping, caught-up-into-my-own-world, look-at-me-everybody, type of thinking. It sounds so conceited. And aren’t we supposed to avoid worship of self?” (more…)

What I remember about seventh grade is finding myself in a new school about five times as big as I’d ever known—I was stumped by algebra, and the girl who wanted to help me get through that class was my only friend. Neither of us were cool, and she didn’t care, but I longed to be accepted by the in-crowd. But every attempt to connect with them ended up in some awful embarrassment. It was a painful time of learning how to make friends and how to be a friend.

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What an incredible, peaceful summer I had! These past few months have added up to the first time I’ve actually spent living on my own—away from my parents or my college. I have grown so much! At the beginning of the summer, I was a little nervous to be starting an internship in a city that I barely knew, with people that I had just met, and a job wherein I didn’t know what to expect. Over time, turning to prayer became such a regular habit that I am immensely grateful for the challenges that I met and dealt with metaphysically in this brand new experience.
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Sometimes the word faith gets a bad rap. That’s because there are different kinds of faith. There’s blind faith, for example, which hopes and wishes something were true, without any logic to support it. There’s also faith based on intelligent reasoning—a deduction of scientific facts, which expects consistent results.

Actually we rely on faith (the scientific kind) in all sorts of ways every day. One really easy example is that we have faith that the earth is round, even though it looks flat to the naked eye. We also have faith that if we take a cruise across the Atlantic, we will never be in danger of falling off the edge of the earth. We hardly even think of this kind of basic reasoning as faith because we are so certain about the shape of our planet.
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