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Our institutional spiritual study guide topic for March is:
"Enlarge the place of thy tent..." (Isa. 54:2 (to ,)
Here are a couple thoughts on this idea from your fellow servers:
"If you read the verse to the end, it talks about the actions needed to accomplish the stretching forth of our habitations: 'spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.'
While I am not active in a prison ministry at the moment, I work as a nurse's aide in a Christian Science residential home. I've found this verse helpful as I think about how to better love my co-workers, the residents and humanity in general.
"Spare not" and "lengthen thy cords" means - to me - not just loving those it might seem easier to love, but reaching out beyond our comfort zone and really seeing each person's true identity through challenging human circumstances.
In order to do this, it's helpful to "strengthen thy stakes" and to ground myself in the understanding of where love really comes from. At the beginning of the day, before I go to work, I remind myself love is not a personal effort or achievement, but the involuntary effect of God's all-goodness. When I start my days with this thought, I often find a really sense of joy as I go about my work."
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"In thinking about this 'Enlarge the place of thy tent…', I was recently alerted to a situation of a fellow-church member involving a family member who was experiencing a mental health issue. I found this wonderful article that helped me see through that challenge on, to me, a more universal basis. It is:
The Mental Soundness that God Gives
By Kaye Cover
From the January 9, 2017 issue of the Christian Science Sentinel
. . .
In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy writes: “The relations of God and man, divine Principle and idea, are indestructible in Science; and Science knows no lapse from nor return to harmony, but holds the divine order or spiritual law, in which God and all that He creates are perfect and eternal, to have remained unchanged in its eternal history” (pp. 470–471).
So despite a society in which diagnoses, symptoms, and predictions abound, especially in regard to mental illness, our expectation should always be that the truth of being can be demonstrated, manifested as a sound mind and body. At all times the label we should claim for ourselves and attribute to others is “spiritual,” for that term describes us perfectly because it includes all of our God-given and eternal qualities.
(You can access the full article by following this link: https://sentinel.christianscience.com/issues/2017/1/119-02/the-mental-soundness-that-god-gives).
I thought of our ministry in prisons in the context of this indestructibility of the relation of God and man, and being held in that relationship eternally. And I was reminded that the 'label' of prisoner includes any and all chains, be they mental or physical, and in the place of the societal label, the only label is 'spiritual.' I am seeing this as an 'enlarging' of my mental tent."
