God is where we are

Several years ago when one of my children, a teenager at the time, went on a wilderness experience in the mountains with a group from summer camp, I learned a big lesson about a tiny little word.

Initially, the Wizard of Oz mindset: “Lions and tigers and bears, Oh my!” had a hold on me and I worried about all kinds of dangers. So I prayed to understand the always-present, benevolent power of God and the impossibility that any of God’s children could venture beyond Him. I recalled many Bible stories that brought comfort: Jesus stilling the waves, Daniel experiencing safety in the lions’ den, Elisha making the poisoned pottage safe to eat, and so on. And I remembered courage-inspiring thoughts from Mary Baker Eddy’s writings and the Christian Science Hymnal.

I reassured myself by praying to see that God never created a material world full of dangers and evil. Everything God made is spiritual and good, including my child and the place where my child is. My child can never be separated from God. So I declared vehemently, “God is right there in that place!”

Then, abruptly, I realized that something was not quite right about that statement. It was that little word “in.” If God is in, I thought, isn’t there an outside to this concept? Doesn’t being in a thing or a place imply that there is some kind of a container or boundary? But Christian Science teaches that God is Spirit and infinite. If God is infinite, doesn’t that mean there is nothing more, no outside, no extra, no extension, no limit? How could God, Spirit, really be in a specific place?

Mary Baker Eddy includes “in” as an entry among the 126 spiritually significant words she described in the Glossary of Science and Health. Perhaps Mrs. Eddy was helping us to think about God with precision. She defines in as “a term obsolete in Science if used with reference to Spirit, or Deity” (p. 588).

Suddenly, I saw a distinction and grasped this truth: God is not in the place. God is the place. The one and only place. Of course! That was a more accurate way to perceive and describe the relation between God and His creation: God is the place where my child exists—my child cannot be in an earthly wilderness but instead is safe with Spirit. Only a limited concept of God would reverse the truth and mistakenly declare God to be in the vicinity of an individual. Infinite God, Spirit, Mind, is the only place any of us can possibly be. It felt natural to confidently replace “God is in . . .” with an expression of greater spiritual clarity, eliminating that little preposition altogether.

I’ve loved learning how Christian Science explains that God is divine Mind and we are His intelligent creation—ideas in Mind. Ideas can’t exist outside the Mind that forms them. Even humanly, if you make a mental picture of an eagle, that eagle can’t fly away out of your thoughts to another place. Your thought is the only place it exists. Just so, God has created us in Himself, Mind, and there is absolutely no place else we can possibly be. Humanly we may be at the beach, in the mall, or at the office, but those places merely approximate spiritual reality. We are actually always in Mind, surrounded by Mind’s qualities and intelligence. God is where we are.

Surely existing in Mind, infinite good, means there is no place outside of Mind where danger could exist or attack from. In Mind there is no opportunity for ferocity, poison, storm, darkness, accident, threat. Only peace, strength, joy, life exist. Where can evil lurk in divine Love? Our place is a perfectly safe place, because it is God.

Who would have thought that a preposition could have such significance! But prepositions define relations between things. Mrs. Eddy wrote in Unity of Good: “God is All-in-all. Hence He is in Himself only, in His own nature and character, and is perfect being, or consciousness. He is all the Life and Mind there is or can be. Within Himself is every embodiment of Life and Mind” (p. 3)

As I prayed with these ideas, the concern I had for my teenager melted into assurance. Of course, my teen returned from this adventure healthy and happy. At this very moment we can perceive and acknowledge God’s infinitude: God is not in our place, God is our place.

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