Hey and welcome to the Christian Science Daily Lift.

Today we'll hear from Tessa Frost, a Christian scientist in Washington, D.C.,

and the director of U.S. Federal Government Affairs for the Christian Science Comedium Publication.

Seeing people as who they actually are, God's spiritual idea,

then allows you to speak to them as such and allows them to receive the information as such.

I remember one meeting in particular where we went into this Senate office and we really needed to meet with a high-level staffer and they gave us their

very, very, very, very lowest staffer. And we left that meeting initially pretty dejected, but then

realized we could see this individual rightly as an expression of God, of wisdom, of intelligence.

And so we sort of corrected our thinking about her and said, okay, Father, what's next?

Well, what's next was that in a short while, she reached back out to us and said she had gone to her high-up team, her legislative director, and it said she thought

this issue was really important and asked for it to be her issue, and if the senator would please

sponsor it. And in fact, he became the lead sponsor of the bill in the Senate. It's very significant.

It really proved to me how you don't want to use a human sense of judgment to make progress on anything or even to assess the progress of our country or of a bill.

I kind of came kicking and screaming to Washington, D.C. The political polarization was never very attractive to me.

And I wasn't so sure that I could naturally play a role there,

but I found that I had rather than political stances to make or sort of a lobbyist role to play,

that the work itself was actually prayerful. And it was about helping people on Capitol Hill to understand Christian science a little bit better and more truly than they might otherwise from other sources and to help them to address honestly if there was a misunderstanding or a misconception of it.

And this particular bill was our avenue through which to have those kinds

of conversations and was certainly important in that particular context. But the focus of our work

was based squarely in praying to see the people across from us and ourselves as God's ideas,

working together in harmony to find right solutions that would bless broadly,

and then also to see how God moves you when your motive is to glorify God and to bless others.

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