There has been at least one day in my life when I was glad I wore glasses.
When I was in high school, I worked evenings alone as a technician in a
medical laboratory. I did all the tests—blood counts, chemistries, almost
anything done in a medical lab—and those were the days in which there were no
machines to do the work as there are today when almost everything is
automated. We did everything by hand then.
This particular
night there were a number of cholesterol tests I had to run. At the time,
cholesterol tests required the use of concentrated and highly corrosive acid.
In the process of setting up the test, I took the reagent bottle down from the
shelf in front of me and picked up the proper size pipette. This is a long
glass graduated tube with a point at one end and a place at the opposite end
to use your mouth to draw a liquid up into it in order to measure a specific
quantity. (It is like sucking soda into a straw and quickly putting your
finger over the end to hold it in the straw and then letting it drip out a
little at a time by lifting your finger.) I measured the correct amount of
acid with the pipette and placed the tip in the mouth of the first test tube
which already had other reagents in it. As I lifted my finger and let the acid
flow into the tube, there was a violent reaction and the contents came boiling
out into my face. I threw off my glasses and ran across the room to the sink,
stuck my face under the faucet and began to flush the acid away.
The wonderful
glasses kept the corrosive liquid out of my eyes but I ended up with a circle
on my nose and forehead which turned red and eventually peeled like a bad
sunburn. My first thought as I was under the running water was, "What
happened? It’s not supposed to do that?" When I went back to the lab bench, I
took a good look at the reagent bottle I had drawn from. It was the correct
bottle and it was clearly labeled. Then I noticed the color was not quite
right and that’s when I smelled it—the distinctive scent of an acid, but
not the one I was supposed to use. Someone had refilled the bottle with
the wrong reagent!
How often in our
lives has something blown up in our faces and we asked, "What happened? or
"Where is God?" How many times have we taken the things of life and combined
them in a way that caused us distress or seemed to result in chaos and we
wondered how God could let such a thing happen. All those lab tests I used to
run on patients were possible because of divine principle and it blew up in my
face because of divine principle. Like cooking, we had recipe cards in the lab
which gave us directions for each procedure. Follow the formula and the
results would follow. Chemistry works under absolute law just like cooking,
and skill, good technique and attention are all necessary to work with
absolute law. So it is with life, too.
Genesis opens with,
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without
form and void.... And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light."
(Genesis 1:1-3) With this first movement in Divine Mind and the six that
followed, order and principle were established throughout creation. Law was
set in motion which governed the lab tests I routinely performed, the
"mistake" which blew up in my face, every recipe I’ve attempted in the kitchen
and the evolution of all my life’s experience.
The "God" which
said "Let there be light" was called in Hebrew, Elohim. It was one of
the twelve names or compound names used for God. For example, when you reach
the second chapter of Genesis, the word used for God is Yahweh. To many
the name, Elohim, is a mystery. Some say that it comes from the root,
El, which means "power." Others say it contains the name, Allah,
which means "covenant" or "formulate by the power of the word." One thing is
certain; Elohim is plural–gods. It has a feminine beginning which is
singular and a masculine ending which is plural and may be the closest we come
to finding a Mother-Father God in the Bible. It is Elohim which
creates mankind in its image-likeness and it is the image-likeness that is
both male and female. Concerning this first chapter of Genesis, Charles
Fillmore, Unity’s co-founder said, "The word ‘God’ in this instance stands for
Elohim, which is God in His capacity as creative power, including within
Himself all the potentialities of being. The ‘beginning’ indicates the first
concept in Divine Mind. ‘Created’ means ideated. The ‘heavens’ is the realm of
ideas, and the ‘earth’ represents ideas in expression. Heaven is the ideal and
earth the mental picture. A comparison is found in the activity of our own
mind: we have an idea and then think out a plan before we bring it forth."
(Mysteries of Genesis, p.12)
That night in the
lab Elohim was present as the unchanging principles I had so many times
used, trusted and even forgotten just as it is present as the unchanging
source of all the principles which are at work in my life though unseen,
forgotten or disregarded. When there seems to be chaos in our lives and things
appear to blow up in our faces, there is order. Whenever we put together
things in an inappropriate, ignorant or wrong way, infinite Mind and Divine
Intelligence are there. Sometimes we have to step back and take our personal
hands off of things and say, "All right Lord, I don’t understand; I don’t know
what to do or how to fix this mess but I am willing to let go and let your
perfect order come forth now." It can be very important sometimes for us to
let go because one tendency some of us have is to work at it and work at it,
to force and shove and try to make something happen. When we let go sometimes
miracles occur. Even a rubber band stretched to the breaking point knows how
to return to its normal state if we only let it go.
Ford was right when
he said, "God is always at work; he’s not just applying for the job." He was
there the day my glasses saved me, not only as the principles that stand
behind all chemical reactions, but also as the glasses themselves which
protected my eyes. God as Mind is present wherever we are as the law of mind
action we use to shape our lives and as the guidance and illumination which
saves us from ourselves.