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Loving our brother, even when it’s not easy

Prayer can open wide horizons of comfort, boundless love, and healing. 

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Bullies, wrongdoers, adversaries – is the world filled with villains? Here’s what the Bible says: “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Boy, can it feel hard to reconcile that statement with the evil we hear reported, or even experience firsthand. But there’s a spiritual perspective we can gain from the Bible that gives us a different view of the people around us. When we reason from the scriptural basis that everyone is made in the image of God, who is divine Love, it makes sense that we are all loving – that everyone is truly good.

The archives of The Christian Science Publishing Society, which publishes the Monitor, have many articles that show how each individual’s spiritual goodness is available for us to see and love. Here’s a selection of them.

When someone persistently mistreats us, turning to the goodness that truly identifies them helps transform the situation, as a group of eighth graders experienced in “Can prayer stop a bully?”

The author of “Healing pain with spiritual truth” needed to see that even controversial political leaders have to be viewed with spiritual love, not anger or hatred – and in doing that he found healing.

“The truth that sets us free to forgive” discusses how a recognition that God perfectly governs and blesses His spiritual creation, frees us to forgive without inhibition, and even restores a right relationship.

Even when there’s anger directed at us, we can let divine Love meet everyone’s need and show us the practicality of recognizing the present reality of spiritual harmony, “A deeper kindness” reveals.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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