Hi there, and welcome to the Christian Science Daily Lift. Today we'll be hearing from

Nancy Mullen. She's from Framingham, Massachusetts. The summer that I was thinking most

about God's safety, I got a camera.

And I was very interested in using the camera and being able to see creatively the world around me.

However, as I walked around my inner city neighborhood, there was this kind of fear over everything. I was a woman alone, and so the way I handled

that was to pray about it. I would take these walks through my neighborhood, and the first part of

every walk was really just getting in touch with God, so that I could get this fear out of the way

and be able to see the good that was

shining through and the results were very moving. There were moments where I looked around

and I could see the beauty in my community and I was deeply touched by that. I felt very close to God

at those moments and it was a feeling of great joy and trust.

I had an experience that made me realize that closeness to God, it's more than a neat, aesthetic

experience. It's a real protection. I had been to a restaurant and was walking back toward my

apartment. And I didn't realize two guys who were walking toward me had evil intentions

until they were right there and grabbed me. And I struggled against them, but they overpowered me

and dragged me into their car.

I realized that I didn't have any physical choice about what was going to happen, but I did

have a choice about what I was going to think about it. And at that moment, I reached out to God

with all of the same trust that I had brought to these prayer walks around my

community. And what came to me right then was a statement that I had been learning from

science and health with key to the scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. It's called the scientific

statement of being. And it begins, there is no life, truth,

...