Our life experiences can sometimes be extreme. When a tumultuous event feels “in your face,” it can be helpful to take refuge in prayer to gain a higher perspective. Doing this isn’t timidly hiding your head in the sand; rather, it’s a commitment to contributing something very positive.
Early on in grade school, I remember a chaotic night when I retreated into prayer and firmly felt God’s tangible presence. I was a passenger in a car traveling slowly along a road in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. There was a tremendous blizzard, and we could see only a few feet ahead.
As carefully as we were going along, our car still slid off the road and ended up in a snowbank. No one was hurt, but as we sat there in the car, the adults loudly blamed one another for our situation.
At first, I listened to them and felt myself become resentful, too. But then I retreated into prayer, as I’d been learning to do in my Christian Science Sunday School classes. Jesus gave insightful counsel on what to do in this sort of situation: “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6).
What a colorful way of describing prayer. Yes, we can enter into our mental closet, becoming inwardly still, quiet, and open to God. Within any chaos, devoting even just a few moments to communing with God, who is divine Love, is pure wisdom. No doubt, it takes dedicated practice to disconnect from the commotion. But it’s worth it to look willingly to God for needed perspective and help.
In a prayer, Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy declared, “Love is our refuge” (“Poems,” p. 4). It is possible, within life’s frenzied intensity, to become more still inside and take prayerful refuge in divine Love.
My prayer that day was so different from what I was used to. At first, I just wordlessly acknowledged God’s presence. I didn’t do this in hope that God might be present; it was a reaction to what I now was actually experiencing. God felt so powerful, substantial, and assuring.
God, Christian Science teaches, is good, without a single evil component. “Love” is a term for God that the Bible employs, and our connection, our oneness, with divine Love is unbreakable, as Love’s entirely spiritual expression. To realize this in prayer brings the all-power of God to bear on what we think, which embraces everything that we experience.
Instead of asking God how our car might be found and what specific things He could do to get us out of this mess, I felt myself becoming so grateful that, in fact, everything was already perfectly fine. This, too, was curiously surprising. Nothing had changed – it still was night, the blizzard still was roaring, and we still were off the road, stuck in the snowdrift. But I was feeling perfectly content. God’s spiritual love and goodness, I could see, were all that mattered.
As I continued to listen in prayer, God told me that, in any moment or any situation, His love and goodness would be all that ever mattered. To this day, that idea remains powerful to me.
In the back seat of the car, there in my mental closet of prayer, I just secretly basked in God’s presence, continuing to feel the contentment that comes with all that divine Love is and does. The next thing I knew, a tow truck was coming along this dark road. Using his truck’s cable and winch, the driver was able to pull our car out of the drift and all the way back up onto the road. The car still ran, and later that night, together in a tiny hotel room, we were all smiles.
“Be still, and know that I am God,” the Bible counsels (Psalms 46:10). Yes, that’s a good first step – to become inwardly still and quiet. Within your prayerful retreat, there is no point in ruminating about any “in your face” chaos, including what’s happening in the world. There is no room for joining the “in your face” anger. Instead, you simply can be humbly grateful that God, divine Love, is everyone’s true refuge.
Yes, no matter what, we can always shelter in Love. In it, we’ll be shown the authority of God, and feel the wonder of God’s tangible presence and tremendous healing goodness.
