Over the past few weeks I have needed to focus on detailed planning and organisation in several aspects of my life and at times this has been intense and mentally very consuming.
Often a sense of stillness and order seemed far from my daily experience and so each day I prayed for the spiritual inspiration I felt I needed to complete what was required that day.
I was reminded about a verse from hymn 50 in the Christian Science Hymnal. It reads:
Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from us now the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.
God gives us strength to go forward when we need it but also the peace to feel His love and security knowing that He will guide us each step of the way.
In God’s kingdom there is no strain, stress or over action but an atmosphere of harmony, tranquility and stillness. Praying with these ideas, I found that each day everything began to fall into place in a natural way and I was able to complete far more than I had expected to.
My prayers along these lines included my family and their busy lives as well our community as daily demands begin to increase as we emerge out of the lockdown restrictions and begin to return to more normal ways of living.
A couple of days ago I went to a garden centre. As I stepped out of the car my foot landed on a credit card that had evidently been dropped by someone. I picked it up and took it inside to hand it over and was told that someone had literally just called to enquire if it had been found! How grateful I was that this person did not need to feel any sense of ‘strain or stress’ losing their credit card but a sense of peace and completeness that it had been found.
When I returned to the car having bought my plants, I walked round to put them in the boot and there on a ground was a £10 note. I picked it up and went back inside to the cashier who I had previously given the lost credit card to and explained that I had just picked this £10 note up too! She hardly had time to thank me as, running out of the door, she called back ‘I know who this belongs to!’ I followed her out and she handed it to a gentleman who had also been buying plants. Apparently, he dropped the £10 note and it blew away and he couldn’t find it!
What beautiful examples of peace and harmony being restored! I was so grateful to be assured that our prayers do ‘ripple out’ and touch the lives and experiences of people we don’t even know!