On from India to Indonesia. After leaving our extraordinary friends in India, we turned our sights to the next privilege of our trip: joining the team of young people organizing the Indonesian Spiritual Activist Summit. The idea for this event was born more than a year before after a group of young people from Indonesia banded together and made the journey (and substantial commitment) to attend the Australian Summit. This is no ordinary group of young adults. Their love for Christian Science, their community, and each other, has created a special bond among them and sparked a fresh fire in the whole community for how the Christ and Christian Science can bless everyone. Including the vast majority of this country practicing a variety of different faiths. (more…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

What does it mean to fall? What would make someone feel like they’ve fallen? Over the course of our lives, we encounter situations that may seem as if we haven’t lived up to the person each of us wholeheartedly desires to be.  It may seem as if we have faltered, and there isn’t any way to be redeemed. We may have had our heart broken, felt betrayed, or that we are unable to trust ourselves or other people. It may be that we have been disappointed, or have disappointed others.

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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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For many Filipinos, the day typhoon Ketsana hit was memorable.  Everyone remembers where they were, what they were doing, and who they were with.  Although it has already been three weeks since the storm hit, some parts of Metro Manila are still flooded in knee-high waters that may not recede until December. Ketsana was immediately followed by Parma, though bypassed Manila and hit the provinces of northern Luzon instead.  This category-5 typhoon caused a lot of landslides in Baguio and its neighboring areas. (more…)

This article is from the December 2008 Christian Science Journal.

The Summer of  2004 I strutted around Washington, DC, like a queen. In actuality, I was an intern in a government agency, but I felt like I was sitting on top of the world. I had just graduated from college with a degree in journalism and had landed a prestigious internship through my mentor. Everything was going according to plan.

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October is Abuse Awareness Month.  As director of a domestic violence intervention program, I work daily with men who have been abusive to the women and children in their lives.
One of the ways that abusive behavior hides itself is by deceiving us into believing that verbal or emotional abuse is not a bad as physical violence, and isn’t really abuse.

Name calling, put downs, intimidation, and threats, however, are forms of aggression that have an impact no less than a slap, push, or hit. Identifying abuse for what it is, and then doing whatever is necessary to correct it, is a critical step in its elimination. Identifying behavior as abusive is freeing for both those affected by this behavior and the abuser because it pinpoints what needs correcting.

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