What I am finding so heartening right now is how people of all religions and non-religions and races and ethnic backgrounds and genders and sexual orientations are coming together to help each other through these challenging times.

This morning I found the message I exactly needed (and isn’t it amazing how we always seem to get the message we most need when we need it?) waiting for me from a dear Methodist friend: “I am rereading the gospel of Matthew in The Message for some new perspective on some familiar texts and I found a description of your life as Jesus is sending out the disciples. (Matthew 10:16-35) Isn’t that delightful? ‘There is great irony here: proclaiming so much love, experiencing so much hate! But don’t quit. Don’t cave in. It is all well worth it in the end. It is not success you are after in such times but survival. Be survivors! Before you’ve run out of options, the Son of Man will have arrived. . . . Don’t be bluffed into silence by the threats of bullies. There’s nothing they can do to your soul, your core being. Save your fear for God, who holds your entire life–body and soul–in his hands.'”

I love that! All of it. Don’t quit. Don’t give up. Don’t be afraid. Christ, Truth, will arrive – has always been with us, I believe – to show us the way out of the darkness. Don’t be scared into silence by the bullies. Stand up to them. They can’t touch or harm what’s essential about us – who we really are – the children of God.

And today when I got home – feeling discouraged and alone and surrounded by dark and cold – I clicked onto Facebook to find this message waiting for me from my dear friend, Patricia – a fellow Christian Scientist: “Let us smash this bowl of delusion and rejoice!!! with this clip attached of a little girl exuberantly smashing a bowl . It’s a teensy clip – only five seconds – but I found myself… well, I teared up, actually. Teared up with courage and hope. I really, really needed that clip of the little girl and her happy exuberance.

I believe that if we listen – if we’re open to them – Love is continually sending us the thoughts we need to move us from moment to moment.

“…the angels of His presence – the spiritual  intuitions that tell us when ‘the night is far spent, the day is at hand’ – are our guardians in the gloom.”
– Mary Baker Eddy

“Angels are pure thoughts from God, winged with Truth and Love… My angels are exalted thoughts, appearing at the door of some sepulchre, in which human belief has buried its fondest earthly hopes. With white fingers they point upward to a new and glorified trust, to higher ideals of life and its joys. Angels are God’s representatives. These upward-soaring beings never lead towards self, sin, or materiality, but guide to the divine Principle of all good, whither every real individuality, image, or likeness of God, gathers. By giving earnest heed to these spiritual guides they tarry with us, and we entertain ‘angels unawares.'”
– Mary Baker Eddy

“These angels deliver us from the depths.”
– Mary Baker Eddy