(My friend in Texas has sent me the following to post on my blog. Hal Shrewsbury is a Naval Acedemy gratudate. He has served 20 years in the Navy as a Naval Aviator where among other assignments he was an advanced jet flight instructor at Beeville, TX. Has an MBA from UCLA. Spent 16 years teaching NJROTC at Millpitas High School, then 15 years a CS chaplain at a juvenile hall in San Leandro Federal Prison in Dublin, and Alameda County Jail where he presented Christian Science to thousands of inmates. Hal is currently a CS chaplain serving a drug rehab facility and juvenile hall in San Antonio.)
Agonizing to make a decision which I thought would either sacrifice a career opportunity or a personal relationship, I spent hours in a Christian Science reading room researching everything I could find only to leave undecided and dreading the decision. Mary Baker Eddy's statement, "Your decisions will master you, whichever direction they take." ("Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures", 392:22) was even more terrifying since I had recently made some bad career and relationship decisions.
I contacted a Christian Science practitioner who patiently listened as I explained my "hopeless" situation in great detail. He then told me that if I had no hope, there was nothing he could do to help me. Shocked because I had never had a practitioner tell me he couldn't help me, I told him I would "get" some hope. He then said I needed to use the truths I already knew and asked me to correct every negative, unGodlike thought that came to me with the truth I knew about God and myself as His image and likeness.
When the fear of losing the relationship came, the thought also came that I could never lose my relationship with God, my most important relationship. Then the thought came that my God-given career was to express God which I could do in any job. I soon regained my peace and joy and when the decision time came, I made it as best I could and it led me to both a wonderful career and relationship...there is never an "either, or" in God's kingdom. "Science and Health" tells us, man "is the compound idea of God including all right ideas;" (475:14-15). I can never express enough gratitude for this practitioner's demand that I both hope and use the truths I had.
In retrospect I learned several lessons:
1. We must always turn to God rather than ourselves for decision.
2. Use the truths we know...Elijah and Elisha both told widow women to use what they had and Jesus used the loaves he had to feed the 5000.
3. Finally, our deicions, good or bad, can never affect God's loving truth about us any more than they can affect the sum of two plus two, but as we replace our fears and concerns with God's thoughts, we will find ourselves having that Mind which was also in Christ Jesus, making beter decisions which always bless us.
