I should have felt the freshness and adventure. Yet, years ago, those new surroundings seemed foreign and unwelcoming. Judgmental at every turn. I felt unsettled. Alone. Often betrayed.

I yearned for delight deep-down. To rest on the only love worth seeking. So I’d repeat this statement over and over, trying get beyond myself: “God is our Father and our Mother, our Minister and the great Physician: He is man’s only real relative on earth and in heaven.” Mary Baker Eddy, 19th Century spiritual healer, who radically relied on God alone — before founding the Christian Science church — included this in a letter to one of her denomination’s newly formed branches.

Comforting ideas that comforted me each day. However it took me years, I think, to realize that I was missing the boat by working so hard to make God’s love a reality for me — because it was already. And perhaps more importantly: not just for me. For in these words about God, divine Love, being Father and Mother, I’d overlooked the word “our.” Caught up in my own despair! I’d left the rest of God’s people — some of those close at hand anyway — pretty much out of my yearning.

Sure I’m convinced that it’s vital to deliberately claim God as my own particular supplier of insight, health, direction. God to be my only go-to guy so to speak. Yet I’ve realized, sometimes uncomfortably, that leaving others out of the equation not only does not fulfill Jesus’ command to love our neighbor as ourselves, it brings only half-joy, half-peace.

For there’s no peace like the glow that has no nagging exceptions; that feels only the sweet aroma of gentle light resting on everything, as if in a lavender sunset. As only Love divine can do. And that as Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures states, brings ‘’fresh pinions … to faith and understanding,’’ where ‘’thoughts acquaint themselves intelligently with God.’’

Leaving others out of our love, justifying why it’s ok because of what they did or said — or are — is incomplete peace. And not the peace God promises us.

Today when those words become persistent prayer, I consciously yearn to feel this Father-Mother God as everyone’s … supplying our joy and comfort, our intelligence and wisdom, our home in generous-ness. And our health, spiritual and physical.

Father-Mother God, always present, maintaining the innate innocence of our own individual manhood-womanhood. Never withheld. No situation nor one of His/Her children ever out of range.

And so I pray to resist the temptation to be be-clouded. I pray to accept that Love divine is right here now — and was indeed right there back then … with feathery touch of grace stretching round it all. Enabling me to re-write the past, and why not! For remembering Jesus’ parable of the wheat and tares I learn to gather the golden wheat, rather than the thorny-tares of memory. To remember the power of “our” in my prayers.

“I saw the love of God,’’ Eddy wrote, ‘’encircling the universe and man, filling all space, and that divine Love so permeated my own consciousness that I loved with a Christlike compassion, everything I saw.’’

To me, as if saying her adventure in Spirit then took greater flight, she added, “This realization of divine Love called into expression ‘the beauty of holiness, the perfection of being’ which healed and regenerated, and saved all who turned to me for healing.”

The graceful truths that Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy brought to humanity are an open promise: that we too can accept Love divine, rest on it, feel its peace without exception.

And live it!

Loving generously with fresh healing adventure.

Patti Kadick lives in Salisbury. This first appeared on her blog aroundabovebeneath.com