On being useful

"I have been giving a lot of thought to usefulness lately.

What is our aim in life? What does God want us to do? What is a healing yearning? What is a real goal? There are wonderful individual answers, and many might be summarized with the simplicity of "usefulness". Being useful, I have been thinking. Being part of the solution - learning more not to be offended or annoyed. Not to feel under pressure or stress. Being the calm and confident expression of God's being. Simply and humbly living a life that is useful! Day after day after day.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health: "All of God's creatures, moving in the harmony of Science, are harmless, useful, indestructible."
(SH 514:28–30)

We have a marvelous heritage and purpose: To be harmless, useful, and indestructible. These three wonderful adjectives are really actions, activities, healing, comforting activities of divine Love. Love moves us and inspires us, Love makes us useful and opens up infinite possibilities for meaningful employment, Love guarantees our eternal being in wholeness, expresses oneness and connectivity. How useful!

"Useful" from the Webster 1828 Dictionary is explained as "producing good; beneficial; helpful towards advancing any purpose..." It is a simple prayer that has opened up for quite a few people a light at the end of the tunnel, an open path, a next step:

"God, let me be useful today - use me in the way that you choose; let me produce some good and let me be helpful towards advancing any purpose, that you are sending my way."

While praying about usefulness I remembered a scene from a documentary I have never forgotten. "How to cook your life" is a documentary by Doris Dörrie about the Zen master and cook Edward Espe Brown, and this is the moment in the documentary I was thinking about. Usefulness - learning from the humility and willingness of teapots.