I had a delightful experience recently that demonstrated God’s perfect care for me, even in the small, day-to-day things of life. It was to do with my trusty hair dryer.
One day last fall, after I’d plugged in the hair dryer to use it, it wouldn’t turn on. I tried resetting the buttons on the GFI outlet in my bathroom, and the ones located on the hair dryer’s plug, but to no avail. As a last check — and in the hope that I would be able to dry my hair! — I tried plugging it into a different outlet, and lo and behold — it worked! Over the next few weeks, I re-checked the bathroom outlet; it seemed to work fine for other things, so the whole situation was a bit of a mystery to me, but not one that seemed worthy of much consideration. Based on my previous experience as I've practiced Christian Science, and having taken to heart Jesus' teaching about not becoming preoccupied with how our daily needs will be met, I simply trusted that if there were an action I needed to take, God, divine Mind, would let me know. So I just kept plugging the hair dryer into the other outlet when I needed to use it, about once or twice a week.
Then, when I was visiting my family for a few days after Christmas, I plugged in the hair dryer to use it, and it simply would not turn on — in any outlet, after any amount of hitting reset buttons. As I went upstairs and started drying my hair with my mom’s hair dryer, I began to realize the completeness of the protection I had experienced, and just how perfectly my needs had been met.
It was suddenly clear to me that during this whole time, the hair dryer had not been functioning properly. I then remembered how I had noticed its retractable cord feeling a bit warm as I retracted it, but figured it was just due to friction, or was something that had always happened, but I’d never noticed it before. It occurred to me that the GFI outlet had been performing its function properly by not allowing the hair dryer to turn on, yet I had been protected from any sort of electrical mishap when plugging it into another non-GFI outlet.
I also realized, via an emphatic spiritual intuition, that the precise moment the hair dryer failed was the one time in the space of several months that I had another one available to me. I remembered that I had planned to bring it with me to my grandma’s over Thanksgiving weekend, but ended up not doing so. I realized that it was very likely the hair dryer would’ve failed then; however, it lasted through Christmas because I still needed it. Furthermore, I saw that because I was innocent — had not ignored any angel messages that might have directed me to replace it sooner — there was no condemnation to be without what I needed. In the end, I replaced it with a nearly identical model on the way back into town on my trip home.
As I reflected on the experience, it reminded me of the Bible story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. (See I Kings 17:8-16.) Despite the fact that there was a famine in the land, Elijah’s trust in God’s assurance that a widow woman would sustain him, and the woman’s trust in turn, resulted in her one remaining portion of meal and oil lasting as long as they needed it to. The resource might have appeared to be at its material limit, but the divine law of God meeting our needs overruled the apparent laws of matter and resulted in an uninterrupted supply of food. In the same way, there had been no gap in my needs being met. As Mary Baker Eddy puts it in the Christian Science textbook, "Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 494).
Whether it’s something as mundane as needing to dry your hair, or something as essential as needing food to eat, when we have cultivated and nurtured our trust in God’s goodness and provision, we see there really are no limits to the extent to which we can experience His loving care for us.