Thank you for this instructive post.
What I find fascinating is how the Bible warns us of coming calamities if we continue in wrong thinking in opposition to God’s Word as given in the Bible. Yet most forms and sects of ‘Christianity’ don’t acknowledge that wrong thinking has bad results because so far as I know of, only Christian Science through Mary Baker Eddy’s teaching not only tells us it does; but also that it is our responsibility to do something proactive about it.
Taking care of our ‘own little space’ is doing much; we have to start somewhere. I’m grateful for many testimonies from the members of this church on “peace be still” and the positive outcomes when applied to predictions or experiences of bad weather. I’ve also experienced the harmonizing effects of prayer in regards to inclement weather and in the past disappointment that this prayer didn’t dissipate the belief of the whole storm. So I work to be grateful for all positive results and to do better ‘next time’:) And follow our Leader better by strengthening my faith.
Mrs. Eddy addresses this in Miscellany p. 292:
My answer to the inquiry, “Why did Christians of every sect in the United States fail in their prayers to save the life of President McKinley,” is briefly this: Insufficient faith or spiritual understanding, and a compound of prayers in which one earnest, tender desire works unconsciously against the modus operandi of another, would prevent the result desired. In the June, 1901, Message to my church in Boston, I refer to the effect of one human desire or belief unwittingly neutralizing another, though both are equally sincere.
In the practice of materia medica, croton oil is not mixed with morphine to remedy dysentery, for those drugs are supposed to possess opposite qualities and so to produce opposite effects. The spirit of the prayer of the righteous heals the sick, but this spirit is of God, and the divine Mind is the same yesterday, today, and forever; whereas the human mind is a compound of faith and doubt, of fear and hope, of faith in truth and faith in error.The knowledge that all things are possible to God excludes doubt, but differing human concepts as to the divine power and purpose of infinite Mind, and the so called power of matter, act as the different properties of drugs are supposed to act — one against the other — and this compound of mind and matter neutralizes itself.