Question: How do you get even a few moments with Haley Henderson-Smith and her husband, Easton Smith, who are understudies to the leads dancing in the ensemble on the national tour of the stage version of Eleanor Bergstein’s Dirty Dancing?

Answer: You use e-mail, cellphone, and your own legs to catch them after one of their weekly understudy rehearsals, 
after one of their ballet classes, at the stage door after one of their eight performances a week, or at a daytime testimony meeting or a Sunday service in a Christian Science church.

For me, the last option proved best. “For us,” says Haley, “nothing is more important than these services.” (more…)

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Brazil is a mature, vibrant field relative to Christian Science. And the questions asked in the workshops held in four cities there reflected this. One of the questions in São Paulo was, how can you help a person through prayer if they’re receiving physiotherapy or another form of treatment? (more…)

In the small towns of Texas on Friday nights in the fall, thousands of people go out to stadiums to cheer on their local high school football teams. Playing high school football in Texas can be compared to playing basketball in Indiana—it’s just what you do. If you’ve read the book or watched the TV show Friday Night Lights, you know what I’m talking about! (more…)

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I have been active professionally for 6 years. During that time I decided to go back to university to continue my studies. I am an active member of a Christian Science church in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where I have served as Clerk/Treasurer for the past 3 years. For many years the Cameroon government had recruited young people like me, but without a signed contract! As the years went by many of them began to worry about their future. I did not want to get caught up in this anxiety, however legitimate it seemed, because I knew that God goes before us no matter the situation! (more…)

After the Indonesian Summit, one half of the Summit team from The Mother Church had to take a red-eye flight to Manila on our way to the Philippines Summit. The night of our flight, we had dinner late, just before heading out to the airport, so we could rest on the 5ish hour flight, and skip the airplane food without going hungry. When the food trolley came by during the flight and the hostess asked if I wanted chicken or fish, as I said “Nothing for me, thank you.” I remember thinking, “If I eat anything at this time, it’ll feel like I have a rock in my tummy in the morning.” Well, we landed in the morning, and as we got off the plane I started to feel like I had a rock in my tummy, even though I hadn’t eaten! This was very inconvenient as I had another eight hour drive to get to Baguio City, where the Summit was to be held. (more…)

I squeezed out of the tiny elevator, onto the fifth floor, as my Spanish home-stay hostess gave me the tour of her colonial-style apartment. I spied my room. With one window to the cold winter world outside and a bed, I could tell it would be my sanctuary for the next three months away from home. She left me to unpack. I heaved my suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it to find, on top of all the clothes, the pink journal my mom had made for me the summer before. Clippings of quotes from the Bible and Science and Health filled the pages and were generously balanced by many stickers of flowers and cheerful-looking shapes. (more…)

Most of the time you hear people refer to Jesus when talking about the Christ. It’s natural, when mentioning Jesus, for people to say, Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus. That’s because Christ is the title for Jesus, sort of like how people use the word, Queen, as the title of a person who may be at the head of a country.

There will only be one Christ Jesus, though. The title isn’t going to be handed down to a successor. But the good news is that you and I have everything good about the Christ available to us, too—now and all the time. (more…)

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Para un país relativamente pequeño, Uruguay tiene un movimiento fuerte de Ciencia Cristiana, que ha estado ya por muchas décadas. Tiene seis iglesias y una sociedad en la capital, Montevideo, y dos más en el interior. Dada las similitudes entre Uruguay y Argentina, así como el hecho que talleres de Escuela Dominical y reuniones para la juventud se llevaron a cabo en ambos países, cubriremos ambos países aquí. (more…)

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During our time in Argentina, Susie gave three youth lectures to about 230 people, approximately 40% of which were close to Sunday School age and/or new to Christian Science. Each lecture started with an explanation that youth is an attitude that everyone can express, with freshness, joy, love, energy and the welcoming of new ideas. Throughout each lecture, the loving and prayerful support of everyone involved was evident. (Highlights from the lectures will be made available in Spanish on tmcyouth.com, and the nine other TMC Youth activities that took place in Argentina will be described in our next blog.) (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.

(more…)