"Progress is the Law"

Good morning,

This morning’s prayers for myself (‘me first’ is mandatory) started with the Lord’s Prayer. I finished the prayer. But then went back to the “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” portion of the prayer…I started thinking of one family member, then 6 others, that had made my childhood the unfun that it had been. I then began to forgive each one of them.

I started by giving each one of them back their familial loving titles, instead of just the names I had thought and spoken of them for so many years. I took a strong mental stand, knowing that “Progress is the Law”.

I allowed myself to realize that this law does bring us all up and forward from our past mistakes, of actions and thoughts. I let them ‘off the hook’ through forgiveness and this progressive law. This freed me and them from the past. It gave me a way to forgive them and to allow Love to enter in and heal us all.

How? By seeing them as blessed and by seeing them through a sense of change for the good (Progress), I could see them as their better selves, as the Children of God. Through this thought process, I got to love and forgive them, see them as God sees them.

Progress IS the Law. I could see how they HAD TO have progressed since those many years back and still now after their passing. They had to progress from the way they seemed to be in my childhood, and into my adulthood for some, because Progress is spiritually the Law. I’ve progressed, so they can and have had to as well.

I get to see them in this better view point. It frees me from the past and lets me love them, forgive them, and let go!

What a joy to see that everyone gets to Progress and be freed from past mistakes, past misbehaviors, and be as we are, our better selves through His Love.

Gentle hugs

Poisons removed

This morning before my eyes opened a part of the Lord’s Prayer was coming to my thought. It was, Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors; and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from all evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.¹

These words are not just words but heartfelt prayer to God, a statement of affirmation. God does give us the supplies of perfect ideas and thoughts that bring us through our day with grace, love and forgiveness. By turning to God alone for our needs both for direction, ideas, thoughts that come from the All-knowing Mind, God, we gain the true sense of what we’re to do today.

This daily, moment by moment activity of turning to God for all frees us from the burden of belief that we’re out in a world of chaos, fear, anger, and doubt and that we’re ‘to fend for ourselves’. What a lonely fear driven thought that is! But because God is All-in-all we must and can turn to this Love for all things. This turning of thought to God brings to our day peace, reassurance, perfect guidance, protection, and the ‘How to do’ anything in all circumstances. For only God is and can give us peace and direction, love and understanding.

To forgive all wrongs, ill-will, disappointments, angry encounters, hurt feelings, is to free not only our ‘debtors’, those who we feel have done something to us, but it also frees us from the harboring of the poisons of anger, resentment, and hard feelings. These resentments and hurts clog our thoughts, harden our hearts, and make us ‘stiff necked’ people. The attributes of resentment poison our other relationships with doubt and mistrust. They make us come into other relationships not fully engaged. They smolder in our thoughts, making us unpleasant without explanation.

To forgive frees us from the past. To forgive allows us to express grace, joy and love with all without constraint. Forgiveness frees us to be our true childlike self, God’s child, the child of Love. It brings ease and joy back into our relationships and thoughts.

Many times our Master, Christ Jesus, included the words, “Thy sins be forgiven thee” when he was healing people. He knew that the only way the sins that create disease and death may be forgiven is by the complete removal of them. He stated to many, ‘go and sin no more’. That is the fullness of forgiveness, that the sins be completely stopped. Those harboring ill-will, a sin against our fellow man, God’s child, must stop completely the holding of grudges. How? By forgiving others and letting go of the thoughts that harbor the anger and resentment. This frees us all and stops the egotism, the sin, the self-superiorities of ill-will.

In the healing in Mark we find his explanation of these words when we read, “Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only? And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts? Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.”²

All that Christ Jesus did wasn’t just for his own good but for all to learn and do as well. When we forgive we are freeing not only ourselves but also those who we are harboring ill-will against. This grace of forgiveness heals.

It is the Christ within us, the Good of God’s creating, the perfect Ideal that we all manifest of God’s likeness that gives us the ability and freedom to forgive. This is what Jesus revealed throughout his earthly career. This Christ raised the dead, healed and fed the multitude, and broke all mortal beliefs concerning life and death. This Christ is ours by reflection. We too may heal relationships through this Christ activity of Love.

Mary Baker Eddy states in her main work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “Sin is forgiven only as it is destroyed by Christ,—Truth and Life.”³ Truth and Life are the synonyms of God, so sin is forgiven only as it destroyed by the Christ power of God.

How? The statement, “Love thy neighbor as thyself”⁴ brings a new view of how to see and express love to our fellow man. This activity of Love frees us. It breaks the chains and fetters of hate. Through the reflection of Love, God, our true nature and expression, we are freed from all ill-will. Love brings to our thoughts love. This love, this grace, this joyful acceptance of others as God sees them, precious, whole, complete, good, brings the wonderful ability to forgive our ‘enemies’.  Love, then, is the key to forgiveness. Love frees us to love!

Today let us stop the poisons of ill-will. Let us forgive as we would like to be forgiven. Let us free ourselves and others from the holding of grudges even for one more hour. Let us be free through the activity of love and forgiveness.

Gentle hugs


1 The King James Version of the Holy Bible Matthew 6 vss. 12, 13
2 ibid Mark 2 vss. 7-11
3Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy page 5 line 23
4 The King James Version of the Holy Bible Matthew 19 vs. 19

Forgiveness..."Upholding innocence"

Forgiveness is a word that some ignore, others try and fail, and others do with such grace it is breathtaking.  I will never forget when the gunman went into the Amish School and gunned down several children.  It wasn’t the evil I’ll magnify in my thoughts and remember.  It was the forgiveness!  The Amish people expressed so much forgiveness and compassion.  Right in the midst of their devastating loss they forgave the shooter and expressed loving kindness towards the man’s mother.  It wasn’t months after the incident, it was practically hours afterwards that they began this process of forgiving. 

When looking up the word “Forgive” there are a lot of definitions such as…‘excuse, condone, pardon…’ These definitions are so lacking and inadequate when it comes to most acts of forgiveness in the simplest forms much less for acts of heinous proportions! How could anyone follow the Master Christian in his command for us all to forgive ‘seventy times seven’¹ when something occurs so large? It may be too hard to contemplate. But then a perfect definition of ‘Forgive’ comes across to us. The definition that states, “to uphold innocence.”

We can do this!  How?  By understanding and seeing Man as God’s child, His Idea—perfect, complete, whole, beloved, loving, free, GOOD—the manifestation and likeness of God’s Selfhood.  Then we realize that we can uphold man’s true innocence as God’s perfect Idea.  This solid foundation of who and what Man really is, the true existence as a child of God, places us where we can take a firm stand and ‘uphold all of man’s true innocence’, including our own.  

Forgiveness isn’t a mortal option but a spiritual activity. The only way we can truly forgive is to lift our views about man from the failing, evil, horrible to the divine, pure, spiritual idea of God.  What God knows about His creation lifts our view from the debase pictures of awful humanity to the glory of God’s creation.  This higher view lifts consciousness and activity. 

Forgiveness is an individual and collective thought and activity.  Jesus couldn’t have healed and brought humanity higher from a low view of mankind. It would have been impossible.  Christ Jesus had to view man from the standpoint of perfection, goodness, God’s beloved.

We too can view man from this standpoint and love enough to forgive, ‘uphold innocence’, and to view each other from a higher caliber of thought, as God’s image and likeness.  We can take each of these challenges to forgive as a spiritual activity instead of a mortal duty.  We can see that by forgiving in this way we are following the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Wouldn’t we want to have others forgive – uphold our innocence – instead of holding a grudge or thinking of us as less than we are, God’s perfect idea?

“Jesus was compassionate, true, faithful to rebuke, ready to forgive. He said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."  "Love one another, as I have loved you." No estrangement, no emulation, no deceit, enters into the heart that loves as Jesus loved.”²

We must see that our duty to ourselves and others is to forgive and leave the punishments and judgments up to God’s highest purpose and thought.  All are corrected by God and His perfect ways of Love.  We need not suffer nor suffer others in our self-beliefs of wrongs.  We are responsible to forgive and can do it gladly and obediently.  We can do this through love for God and His idea Man. 

We can and must forgive.  We might as well start right now and go forward blessing others by forgiving them so that we too may be forgiven. After all, our Lord’s Prayer and instruction contains within it these dutiful and promising words, “And forgive us our debts, AS we forgive our debtors…for if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you:”³

Gentle hug


1 The King James Version of the Holy Bible Matthew 18 vs. 22
2 Message to the Mother Church, 1902 by Mary Baker Eddy pg 18 lines 12-18
3 The King James Version of the Holy Bible Matthew 6 vs. 12, 14