Thanks for joining us for another week, full of inspiration with the Christian Science Daily Lift.

Sharing from Harvard, Massachusetts, is Christian Science practitioner and teacher Laurie Snorick.

Her lift can also be heard in French.

Do our prayers really make a difference to others?

We may wonder about that when our heart goes out to someone struggling or we're moved by

a difficult news story.

Are our individual prayers maybe just too small to really matter?

Christian science shows that prayer isn't a fragile hope, cast out into an immense darkness.

Rather, it's a conscious realization of divine truth. Truth is another name for God. In her book, Science and Health with Key to the

Scriptures, Mary Baker-Ready defines prayer as not pleading with a distant God, but awakening to

God's infinite goodness, as already here, already present, right in the midst of whatever seems difficult.

When our thinking yields to the understanding of God's alness,

fear is silenced and discouragement gives way to gratitude and courage.

When we pray from this spiritual standpoint of an all-good God and of God's all-good creation,

it gives us a solid basis for expecting healing.

This prayer doesn't ignore the world's problems, but it enables us to see things correctly.

Knowing that God is filling all space and governing all, we're

able to view problems as untrue beliefs about spiritual reality, not actual things that need fixing.

With a long record of consistent healing experienced by countless individuals, Christian science

confirms the reliability of spiritual

law and the legitimacy of trusting prayer to reveal truth. Every time we glimpse the true nature

of life as entirely spiritual, to see as God sees, it helps defeat whatever might obstruct spiritual progress in ourselves

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