Preparedness
W. John Murray
Excerpt from:
The Gleaner
Vol. 7, No. 10
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.,
New York, July 1916.
"Go, borrow thee vessels abroad
of all thy neighbors." - II Kings
4:3
The subject
of preparedness is one that is occupying
the human mind very much at the present
time. We listen to orations on both sides
of this very important question and we
come away with a feeling that back of
each speaker there is much that is true,
much that is commendable and much that is
worthy of adoption. We are almost
distressed over the situation, because
there is so much in favor of militarism
and so much in favor of anti-militarism.
The logic of both parties is almost
unassailable. We are going to be thrashed
if we are not prepared, and we are going
to invite a thrashing if we do
prepare.
The
individual who feels that he is about to
be set upon by other individuals feels a
certain amount of security in providing
himself with a six-shooter, but it is not
really the full essence of security,
because there is lurking back in his mind
always, a little feeling that the other
chaps may get the drop on him with their
trusty weapons.
What is true
of individuals, then, must be equally
true of nations. No matter how well we
provide ourselves with armaments of war,
there is lurking back in our national
mentalities a suspicion that in some way,
somehow, the enemy may get in; and so in
this there is not the fullest sense of
security.
If one man
should say to another man who is carrying
a six-shooter, "Dispose of it and put
your absolute trust and confidence in the
protecting power of Divine Love," he
would be inclined to take the matter as a
joke and laugh at it, unless he were
really alive to the spiritual necessity
of things. The idea of an intangible
thing like Divine Love protecting an
individual against other individuals who
are bent on his destruction, is too
absurd for acceptance, too ridiculous to
think about.
If a man
should rise today in the Congress of the
United States and through that body, ask
the nation to disarm and throw itself
absolutely and unqualifiedly and entirely
upon the protection of that Infinite Love
which is God, he would be regarded as a
foolish idealist. So, perhaps, it is
better that we refrain from telling the
man with the six-shooter to put it up and
depend upon God for his protection, when
he is not yet ready for a great spiritual
truth. It may perhaps be just as well for
our statesmen to keep quiet on this very
important subject until the nation, which
is composed of individuals who carry
six-shooters, and every other nation on
the face of the earth, is thoroughly
alive to the great protecting power of
the Infinite; because really it seems
like a waste of words for peace advocates
to be suggesting to other men the
necessity and the wisdom of disarmament,
and going about trusting to some unseen
power which they know not of.
Preparedness
is a necessity, a giant necessity, but
there is preparedness and
preparedness; and if we can take
our thoughts off these great national and
international issues and bring them down
to ourselves as individuals, and study
preparedness as it applies to our
particular personal experiences, it may
be that we shall be saved a great deal of
anxiety and apprehension concerning the
future of nations, a great deal of
anxiety and apprehension concerning the
proximity of war in this country with
other countries; it may be that we shall
be able to detach ourselves for the
moment from these great, tremendous,
universal issues and get down where we
belong for the moment; just to
ourselves.
Of course,
it may seem rather selfish to be
considering our personal difficulties
when such great, universal troubles are
at our door. We may feel as if we are
called upon really to discuss these vital
questions, but may it not be sometimes,
in discussing these very vital questions,
there is more of curiosity than real
interest? Sometimes the man who sits
around the stove in the corner grocery
store discussing war would not be nearly
so anxious to go to war if it came about.
It is so easy for us to discuss these
things so far off, simply because they
are great clouds on the horizon.
What is our
duty, really? First, it seems to me that
a man's duty is to make the best and the
most of his own life; because it is only
in so far as a man is able to make the
best and the most of his own life that he
becomes a real factor in society, a real
unit in the great whole of things which
is making for eternal progress,
notwithstanding these wretched wars that
go on.
Preparedness
is a something that concerns you
individually, and because it is, you have
been preparing in many ways for your own
personal betterment and for your own
personal happiness and for your own
personal prosperity, knowing that no one
else will prepare for you, knowing that
the nation as such, as big as it is, will
not labor very intelligently or very
diligently for your own personal
prosperity, because that is a something
which rests wholly with you. Yes, though
you fight for it and almost die for it
and are incapacitated from future
lucrative employment as a result, your
pension may be so meagerly small that you
wonder if the big thing takes care of the
little thing very well after all.
It has been
my sad misfortune to see on Waterloo
Bridge and other places, men maimed for
life begging for bread. Tommy was all
right in the trenches, but after the
thing is over, Tommy is a mere speck in
the great thing.
And so,
while I would not destroy the idea of
patriotism in the human heart, because I
think that would be quite impossible;
while I would not for a moment set aside
the great thing which is worth while,
namely, the love of country, the love of
humanity and love of justice; I would
have the individual doing the thinking on
his own account, for himself, even though
it appear in the beginning to be just a
trifle selfish; because after all, I say,
if you do not take care of yourself,
there are few in the world who are
willing to do it for you. The nation
won't, so if you have any such delusion
as that, get away from it. The nation, as
such, gives to you an opportunity to make
a living. Every nation does this, but it
is up to you to do it. So preparedness,
then, is to be a purely personal
thing.
We read the
little account of the widow who had been
reduced to abject poverty. Her husband
owed a debt to those in authority, and
those in authority were availing
themselves of an existing law to seize
upon her children as bonds for the debt
which was not paid. It was not sufficient
that this poor member of society should
lose her husband through death, but now
the authorities should seize upon her
children, who were the only visible means
of support she had, and use them and
their labor to the end of paying this
debt which her husband had contracted
before his death and had not met.
Being a
godly woman, she turned to a man of God,
to the prophet, as most people do in
their extremity; and Elisha asked her
what she had, what there was remaining
out of the estate. "A pot of oil," she
said, "just a pot of oil." "Then," he
said, "go, borrow thee vessels of thy
neighbors, empty vessels; not a few. And
when thou art come in, shut the door upon
thee and upon thy sons, and pour out into
all those vessels."
Now that
seemed almost as silly as to tell a man
to put up his six-shooter when he is
afraid of another man; almost as foolish
as to tell a country to disarm when all
the other countries on the face of the
earth are armed to the teeth. Why should
a woman take the empty vessels into the
room and begin to pour of the full vessel
into the empty vessels? What would she
gain thereby? What would she profit?
Naturally those arguments rose in the
woman's mind. The question with her was
not a question of pouring oil from the
one vessel into a lot of other vessels,
but just simply a question of rising
above poverty.
But the man
of God knew what he was doing. He was
resorting to a higher law than she
understood, and all he asked of her was
obedience, and she was sufficiently
sophisticated in the law of God to be
obedient at least, to that which she
could not understand, and so she did like
many women of Israel in that day - she
was obedient to the prophet. She went
into the room and the oil multiplied.
The lesson
here is first, obedience; second,
preparedness of a kind that is higher
than the preparedness that we talk so
much about. She had been praying for an
increase of her substance and like all of
us, her substance had been gradually
lessening until she had come down to this
lonely pot of oil, which she no doubt was
just cherishing with all the power of one
who thought that when it was gone she
would have nothing left at all.
She had
prayed and prayed intently, but she had
not prepared for the answer to her
prayers. If it came, what would she have
to put it in? What was there to receive
it? She had prayed for abundance, but she
had feared poverty. She had prayed for
increase, but she saw persistent decrease
going on. The prophet knew that the only
way to bring about an answer to her
petition, the only way to better her
condition in life, was to change the
current of her thoughts, adding to
prayer, preparation for the thing being
prayed for, - a form of preparedness that
invites the thing we desire, a getting
ready for it, so to speak, and then
having it flow naturally and normally and
without trouble or torment.
The increase
was not due to any other law than the
higher law which says that a thing
standing still never increases. A bottle
of oil, cherished because it is the last
bottle in the house, will not increase by
reason of being cherished any more than a
dollar squeezed in the palm of the hand
will grow. It is the divine law of
circulation - it had to be set in motion.
There must be, according to the prophet's
idea, something doing as well as
something praying. She must pray
for increase, but she must get ready for
it. She must get vessels, and it is very
significant that the flow of oil does not
cease until there are no more vessels to
fill. The goodness of God never ends so
long as we are willing to receive it, so
long as there is that preparedness of the
soul which reaches out for the goodness
of God and attracts it in all of its
abundance. It only ceases when there are
no more vessels.
In the third
chapter of the second book of Kings there
is another wonderful incident related.
The king of Israel had gone out to seize
upon the king of Moab because the king of
Moab had refused to pay his tribute. With
him he had taken two other kings, the
object being to vanquish the king of Moab
and seize upon his treasures as just
payment for bills long rendered and long
due.
For seven
days the king of Israel and his two
allies traveled across the wilderness and
then camped, only to discover that in the
place where they camped there was water
for neither man nor beast; and over there
was the fortress of the king of Moab. Men
who having nothing to drink and horses
who have nothing to drink can neither
travel nor fight, and so the king of
Israel became depressed and dejected. To
go back was impossible. He was seven days
away from his base of supplies. He was
just one day from the fortress of the
king of Moab. If the king of Moab should
know that the king of Israel and his
armies were starving for water, it would
be a very easy matter to swoop down upon
them and demolish them, great and
powerful as they were; and in his despair
the king of Israel cried out for some
relief.
It was a
cloudless sky and a hot day and there was
no evidence of water anywhere in the
great desert. In this moment of distress,
one of the men of the army came forward
and said, "Elisha the prophet is in this
vicinity." Someone always seems to come
along and tell us in the hour of our
extremity that near us is a man of God;
and the king of Israel with the king of
Judah and the other king, went off in
search of Elisha. Presently they found
him. They poured out their tale of woe.
The first thing that Elisha did to the
king of Israel was to rebuke him for his
apostasy, for his having turned his back
upon his God in his days of prosperity,
for having left God until the very last
thing - a rebuke which we all merit,
really. The prophets did not spare kings
any more than they spared peasants.
The king of
Israel accepted the rebuke, and then
Elisha said to him, "Make ditches in the
valley. Make ditches." Now in those days
they made ditches in valleys for the
purpose of being filled with water during
the rainy season. From these ditches men
and horses and cattle generally were
refreshed and invigorated. Make ditches
in a valley that is as dry as the desert
of Sahara! Make ditches on a red-hot day
with the sun shining in the heavens and
not a cloud to indicate the approach of
rain! Get ready! You know something about
the law of preparedness, so far as your
horses and your military are concerned,
so far as your ammunition is concerned,
but you don't understand the law of
preparedness on its higher plane.
There must
have been some questioning in the minds
of the kings. There must have been some
argument going on mentally. "Why should
we make ditches in Death Valley, a place
where rain is rarely ever known to fall?"
But obedience was the divine requirement,
and so we find the Israelites to a man
turning out into the valley and digging
ditches all day long under a broiling
sun; and in the sweat of their brows they
dug ditches, and when night came they
retired to their tents to sleep the sleep
of weary men. In the morning, we are
told, the ditches were filled with
water.
Now this may
sound like a fairy tale to those who do
not believe in miracles, to those who do
not believe in the operation of a higher
law than we common people understand. But
it is the illustration of what always
takes place, always must take place, when
men will actually prepare for the things
they are praying for.
How many of
us prepare for the thing we are praying
for? We pray for health and we are honest
in our prayer for it, but do we always
prepare for its fulfillment in our
physical economy? We pray for health but
we are afraid of the consequences of our
present malady. We pray for health but we
resort to everything but the spiritual
means to procure it.
The
spiritual means of procuring health are
so intangible, so incomprehensible. It is
like expecting rain from a cloudless sky
on a red-hot day, to believe a man should
be healed by the power of thought alone
without drugs and medication. That is so
out of the ordinary that when a patient
goes to a practitioner or a modern
prophet, as we might speak of him, and is
told to dispense with his drugs and rely
absolutely upon the intangible and
invisible power of the Holy Spirit to
heal him, I can imagine there is just as
much questioning going on in his mind as
there was in the days of the king of
Israel. "How shall these ditches be
filled since there is no evidence of
approaching rain?" "How are we to be
healed unless this man rubs us or gives
us something or does something to us that
is physical and material and tangible?
How is this healing going to take place
unless we can watch the operation of the
healing with our physical eye?"
There are
the questions. A man or woman may be in
the valley of financial difficulty,
praying for relief from the pressure of
finance, and like the widow who hugged
her last vessel of oil, that man or woman
may be clinging to the last few remaining
dollars in the bank with the tenacity
that is born of absolute despair.
Some time
ago such a case occurred. Things looked
black and gloomy in this particular
valley of finance. Prayers had gone up
without ceasing, but every day the man
went to his office and expected nothing
but bills. He dreaded to open his mail,
knowing just what would fall out of each
envelope. It meant a picture of more
bills and a reminder of other bills that
had been sent long ago. He clung to these
few dollars which he knew were not
sufficient to pay the big bills or even
to provide a roof to shelter his
family.
Such a man,
like the king of Israel, turns to a
modern prophet and asks what he shall do.
He is told to dig ditches; dig ditches -
to prepare for the grandest things that
he has ever experienced in his life; to
get ready for a more profitable business
than he has ever done in his life. It
sounds strange, unusual and absurd. What
does the prophet say? "Take those few
remaining dollars you have in the bank
and advertise."
How many men
have feared to advertise and yet have
expected, through their prayers, that it
would be known to the public that they
were on earth and had goods on their
shelves? They have prayed for success but
they had feared poverty. The thing that
God answers is the thing that is in the
heart, not the thing that is on the lips
of a man. If a man has a prayer for
success on his lips and a terrible fear
and dread of failure in his heart, that
is the thing that is going to come to him
by the law of attraction. The prophet
knew that the only way to correct that
fear is to get the man to dig ditches, to
do something, to reach out after the
thing that he is praying for, literally
reach out for it, to do something out of
the ordinary, something unusual.
Years ago,
one of the largest concerns in this
country - at least I have had it from a
very good authority - a concern that you
are acquainted with because you have seen
their advertisements everywhere - Enoch
Morgan Sons' Sapolio - got to the place
where it seemed as if the few thousand
dollars they had in the bank would have
to be paid to their creditors and they
disorganize and disband and go out
completely. There was a meeting of the
board one day and the majority were in
favor of doing this very thing, but one
intrepid soul must have had a prophetic
vision, for he said, "We ought to do one
more thing before we give up." They
listened to him, and this was his plan:
To take every dollar that was in the bank
and to put it into an advertising
campaign. They were filled with fear, but
he finally won. By the very strength of
his character and by the very poise and
power of his personality, he moved the
others in his direction. The thing was
done, and from that day to this sapolio
has been a paying proposition.
There is
such a thing as hiding one's light under
a bushel. There is such a thing as
concealing one's best qualities. There is
such a thing as being hyper-modest. I do
not advocate immodesty in business or in
anything else, but I believe that
whatever is good or worth while is worth
bringing to the attention of the
people.
Jesus did
not advertise in the daily papers, some
of the churches tell us. But he
advertised his goods by going up and down
the villages and cities of the world of
that day. He advertised not only by
preaching about his goods, but actually
delivering them. He advertised by
performances in the market places. He let
the world know that he was upon the
earth. He had no mock modesty; howbeit,
he had some sense of the fact that the
Father was greater than he. On the other
hand, he recognized the fact that he and
the Father were one.
You remember
when the people followed him out into the
wilderness and were hungry and his
disciples came to him, saying "We have a
great number here and they are hungry.
Shall we send them back to their homes?"
"No," he said, "feed them. Take care of
them. They have come out here for a good
purpose and now we will feed them, not
only spiritually, but in the way that
they can best understand." "But," they
said, "we have only five loaves and a few
small fishes." He said, "Make them sit
down in groups of five, ten and a
hundred."
Now here we
see preparedness with a vengeance -
nothing in sight but five small loaves
and two small fishes, and making this
great multitude sit down in groups of
five, ten and a hundred, in order that
they might be more expeditiously served.
Remember that he made them sit down
first. They must get ready for the thing
that is going to come their way. They
must get ready with all their heart and
soul and mind and body, and then the
thing will gravitate in their direction,
just as responsibility gravitates in the
direction of any man who is willing to
assume it.
They sat
down and they were fed, but they wouldn't
have been fed if they hadn't sat down.
Their very mental attitude would have
offset the thing they craved, the thing
they desired. If they had stood there and
argued and questioned and worried about
the situation, as to how the thing was
going to be met, they would have
defrauded themselves; and this is just
what so many people do today. So many of
our own people in Divine Science, who
ought to know better, sit down and just
wonder and marvel how this particular
experience of theirs is going to be
overcome, how the finance to meet this
peculiarly pressing situation is going to
come. They are thinking of this person or
that person and the other person and a
group of persons, and they can't see how
it can humanly come; and then perhaps in
their desperation the king of Israel is
driven to the prophet within them. The
reasoning intellect is driven to the
divine intuition. The human inclinations
of thought are silences in those quiet
moments when the soul finds its comfort
and its solace and its vision in the
realization of the presence of God.
The prophet
is only a man who knows a little more of
the divine law than we, that is all. The
prophet is one who knows that there are
operations of divine law on higher planes
of consciousness than the ordinary rude
man of the world understands. He doesn't
create anything, he simply brings already
existing things into manifestation. He
simply proves that things never grow by
standing still, but circulation is the
divine law. You all know that in the
money world, but if you are cherishing
your last dollar, if you are hugging it,
you don't know anything about
circulation. You are afraid. Yea, though
you pray for abundance and still keep
that fear in your hearts, your last
dollar will presently be taken away from
you. Some unexpected something
arises out of the blue and calls and
demands that dollar and you have to give
it up, and yet you were reserving it for
something else. How often it has happened
to us.
Dig ditches.
If you are not satisfied with your lot in
life, if it is not what you feel you are
entitled to as the sons and daughters of
God, don't content yourselves with merely
praying about the situation. Go into the
silence often and feel and know your
unity with that Divine Opulence which is
God, and then get ready. Do something.
Reach out; take another room. Of course,
it all sounds foolish, but no more
foolish than digging ditches or getting
empty vessels. And if you will see this,
you will see that all through the Old and
New Testaments, every prayer that was
really answered was answered because of a
certain amount of mental preparedness on
the part of him who prayed. It would have
been folly for the man stricken with
palsy to pray and pray for physical
healing without preparing to get it, so
he urged the man who was carrying his bed
to carry him up to the roof and break
through the roof and lower him into the
presence of Jesus. You know that is
preparedness with a certain amount of
vigor to it.
Here is a
woman who for eighteen years has been
praying for physical healing. She has
been having constant hemorrhages. She has
tried all the physicians of all the
schools of her day and she has been
gradually growing worse. Then one day she
forces her way through a crowd, pushing
perhaps rudely, because people do have to
push rudely in order to get through a
crowd that is pressing upon some
individual. Perhaps she rudely elbowed
her way in until she touched the hem of
the garment of the Man who she believed
could cure her. That was preparedness. In
her heart she was saying to herself, "If
I may but touch his garment, I will be
whole." It was not enough for her to pray
by the roadside or in the quiet of her
home. She must reach out for this
thing.
And so it is
with us. Preparedness is that quality of
the mind that reaches out to better one's
situation in life by purely legitimate
means; to rise above the limitations of
every kind and character; to overcome the
things that make for limitation and to
seize upon the great, tremendous
possibilities of the human mind, to bring
out the things which you desire, and
which are real and necessary to your
progress, to your piety, to your
power.
Have you
only one pot of oil in the house? Go
borrow thee vessels and not a few. Have
you only a few miserable dollars in the
bank? Be ready to get more dollars. There
is a lesson in this pouring out of oil.
How many times in life we have justified
ourselves in shutting up the pores of our
compassion when someone more needy than
ourselves has applied and appealed to us
and we have said, "I have only got just
so much left. If I give to you, I shall
have nothing for myself." Perhaps that is
the lesson that the widow needed to
learn: that if she got ready to pour the
little oil she had in other vessels which
contained none, she might discover that
the very fount from which all oil
proceeds is inexhaustible and omnipresent
in its abundance. All she had to do was
to distribute, to circulate the little
she had; because it is true that through
healthy circulation everything grows, not
only in pots of oil but in pots of
dollars. Keep them, hug them, cherish
them - will they grow? Not at all. They
are like seeds in the garden which,
scattered, fill the earth with grain. It
is not the thing we keep that makes for
prosperity, it is the thing we
invest.
How many
more men and women would invest if they
could only overcome their sense of
stupefying, paralyzing fear? How many men
would broaden out into larger fields of
opportunity; how many men would leave and
quit their positions and go into business
for themselves, and how many men would
increase their business operations who
are already in business if it were not
for a certain sense of fear? They want to
expand, they crave to expand, but
inwardly they contract, through this
repressing, suppressing sense of fear and
dread. But the prophet says, "Dig
ditches." "Get more vessels." Don't be
contracting your outlay to the thing you
have. Reach out; expand. That is what you
are here for.
"Behold, we
are the sons of God." "God created us to
have dominion," says the psalm. A man is
not having dominion so long as he is
contracting his outlook, and so the
admonition of the prophet to the king of
Israel and to the woman of Israel was :
to the one, "Dig ditches," and to the
other, "Get vessels;" and of Jesus to the
assembled multitude: "Sit down."
Get ready -
that is the great thing, get
ready. We have prayed for the best.
We have prayed for the best, and prepared
by a strange instinct of the uneducated
mind for the worst, haven't we? Haven't
you? Of course you have. We have prayed
for the best in life and prepared for the
worst; prayed for life and prepared for
death; prayed for health and prepared for
days of sickness; prayed for sunshine and
prepared for the rainy day.
We pray for
prosperity but we don't make any effort
to contain it when we get it, and that is
why so much of it spills over into
riotous living. We don't prepare anything
into which to put our increasing
abundance. We don't see a place here to
put it where it is going to do the most
good. We pray for prosperity and we get
it, legitimately or illegitimately, and
it slops over into the Great White Way or
any other way that comes along.
But this
does not change the fact, that there is
preparedness and the necessity of it. If
you are praying for expansion, reach out.
Advertise more. Don't be too modest about
your goods, if they are worth while. If
they are not worth while, get rid of
them. Above all things, remember that it
is only in the degree that you are
prepared to receive the blessings of God
that you will receive them; not in the
degree that you are prepared to pray and
petition and supplicate for them, but in
the degree that you are prepared to dig
ditches; provide vessels; and sit down,
in order that Christ may feed you upon
the increased abundance which is always
at hand and which belongs to you as the
sons and daughters of God.
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
