The Bible holds beautiful images of flowing water as sacred metaphors for refreshment, goodness, purity, spirituality, peace, and life itself. I love to sit by a river, especially our local McKenzie river as it comes down the mountains, and watch the water flow over, around, and through the obstructions placed in its path. To me, it’s a metaphor for unstressed persistence and the continual newness of now. The water I see before me is never the same in one moment as the next. It has a musical joy that flows unimpeded from its inexhaustible headwaters.
Always moving, always fresh, rivers also represent the constant inspiration of divine Mind, the source of all movement. The human mind has so many limitations it has placed on itself. It is said that 90% of its thoughts are the same every day. It tires, gets exhausted, and comes to a stop. It proceeds with fits and starts, with promises and broken promises. The human mind or ego can’t maintain anything for long. That’s why it isn’t able to heal. It just can’t sustain the effort to hold onto a truth eternally.
But the human mind can yield to the divine Mind, the Mind we all share and have equal access to. Physicists like to call it nonlocal Mind. Some call it God. This vast, infinite Mind is the source of harmony, which likewise always moves, as it does in music. Changing color and shape, tempo and dynamics, harmony goes from beauty to majesty to play to rest, just as the river does. Science and Health defines heaven as “the reign of harmony; the realm of unerring, omnipotent, and eternal Mind.” Jesus reminded us that life on earth can be “as it is in heaven.” The human mind’s pool of stagnant thoughts can be exchanged for the free flow of fresh ideas from divine Mind right now, on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus said essentially, “Don’t wait. Find this heaven within you, here and now.“
As the human mind becomes accustomed to yielding to the divine Mind, change becomes less fearsome and obstructions and impediments are seen no longer as problems but temporary events to be inevitably flowed over, around, or through.
“Be still and know that I am God,” the Bible urges the human mind. The best the human mind can do is be still and defer to the movement of divine power and activity. Let God, divine Mind, do the knowing and it will move through your experience with unlimitable effects. One original idea from divine Mind flows out into eternity, giving life to everything it touches, just like a pure river.
“The calm, strong currents of true spirituality, the manifestations of which are health, purity, and self-immolation, must deepen human experience, until the beliefs of material existence are seen to be a bald imposition, and sin, disease, and death give everlasting place to the scientific demonstration of divine Spirit and to God’s spiritual, perfect man.” (SH 99:23-25) Mary Baker Eddy
Everyone has this flow available.
Carolyn
I love the idea of thoughts flowing like the river and continuing even around obstacles. Thank you!
Ginny
So beautiful and uplifting !
Joanna Branvold
This is a wonderful message, Cindy. There is so much food for thought here. thank you so much.