Don’t ask so many questions!

I was not raised in Christian Science, but in a more “mainstream” Christian denomination. Still, I felt strange growing up. I asked questions about God for which no one seemed to have satisfying answers. In fact, not only did they not have answers, they didn’t seem overly disturbed that God was unknown to them. Instead, they reveled in the mystery of God.

But I didn’t want God to be a mystery. I wanted to understand Him, to know how to best live my life in line with the way I believed I was created to.

I wondered why an all-good God would tempt man, knowing that he would give in to the temptation. And if man was made in the image and likeness of God, what did that mean about me? I mean, God is spiritual and not material in any way; but I appear to be very material. How, then, am I the image and likeness of God?

By the time I was a teenager, I was so eager to find answers and understand God better that I embarked on a journey. I stopped asking others and decided to go to the source: I would read the Bible all the way through.

On this journey, I found a God of love that nurtured, directed, and healed His people. I gained a profound sense of closeness with God that led me to start relying on Him for everything. I even found myself healed through my own prayers before I knew anything about Christian Science.

While my journey through the Bible was very successful, it was by no means complete. There were parts of the Bible I didn’t really understand. And I still wanted to know more about God. I was resistant to religion, though, because to me it represented an organization that wanted to explain God to me on its terms, and to tell me how to think. That didn’t work for me. So, in my mid-teens, I came to the conclusion that while I was very interested in spirituality and in having a relationship with God, I would never be a member of a church.

Then I met a young woman at school who was a Christian Scientist. We became friends, and when I visited her home she and her father would talk to me about God in a way that no one else ever had. While I can’t say that I was on board completely, what they said made sense and rang true to my sense of God. This was a new experience for me!

My friend gave me a copy of Science and Health that I took with me to college. There I read it through completely to better understand the ideas that she and her dad had shared with me. I was blown away! I felt like the author had had all the same questions that I’d had, and that she had found actual answers. It seemed that I was on the same path as the author, but she was a lot further down it than I was.

I started attending the Christian Science Sunday School while I was in college. I absolutely bombarded my poor teacher with all of my questions, but she was unfazed. Instead of being made to feel strange about my questions, I was encouraged to ask them and to seek answers. I was taught that God was knowable, and that He loved me as His very own unique and wonderful creation.

As you might be able to guess, I went on to marry my friend who introduced me to Christian Science. And only a week before we were married, I did what I thought I would never do—I joined The Mother Church. I did so because the church encourages its members to seek answers to their questions and to test the practicality of what they learn in Christian Science. This was a mission that I could sign up for, so I did. Best of all, joining with a group of people who are committed to knowing God the way I yearn to has made me realize that maybe I’m not so strange after all.