There’s an app you can get on your smartphone called What3words. It divides the earth’s surface into small squares, each having a unique address that consists of three words.
Although the words for every square on the globe are already assigned by the app, it got me thinking about what three words I’d use to sum up where so many people live today. Is it a place of “chaos and confusion,” of “discord and violence”? It certainly appears that way from events and rhetoric filling the media.
But Christian Science teaches that we can look beneath the surface appearance of things, as Christ Jesus did, to find the deeper, God-established facts. Jesus often used a three-word term to indicate where we all live right now: the “kingdom of heaven” or “kingdom of God.”
What do we know about this kingdom? Jesus told his followers and others, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17) and “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
Mary Baker Eddy thought deeply about this spiritual realm. In the Glossary of her main work, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” she defines “Kingdom of Heaven” as “the reign of harmony in divine Science; the realm of unerring, eternal, and omnipotent Mind; the atmosphere of Spirit, where Soul is supreme” (p. 590). The Glossary’s definition of “heaven” includes “harmony; the reign of Spirit; government by divine Principle” (p. 587).
This makes it clear that to find true harmony and peace, we need to understand God’s absolute government of His creation. And the names for God used in those definitions – Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle – help us do that because they indicate that God’s nature is expressed as integrity, precision, wisdom, wholeness, and so on.
Living with this understanding of God’s harmonious government and allowing it to reign in our thoughts, we naturally come to see and acknowledge the presence of God, good, in our experience. We can be sure that whenever we recognize and express God-derived qualities such as kindness, honesty, and joy in our day, right there the kingdom of heaven is being manifested “at hand.”
In our prayers for the world, we can look beyond what’s going on in the human scene and affirm that each individual expression of infinite Spirit is cherished by God and that this never changes.
Our concerns and fears stem from the misconception that what we perceive with the physical senses is what actually is. But Jesus urges us to consider God’s perspective. God made all that truly exists. Right where we see a material world in turmoil, God’s kingdom is expressing the divine nature as spiritual and good, excluding any element of evil. Jesus called evil a lie (see John 8:44) because he knew that God made only good. And a lie can’t deceive us when we know the truth. Accepting the true, spiritual view reverses fear and harm. I have experienced this.
One time, I was traveling at night on a train where you couldn’t walk through to the next compartment. The only other passenger in that car was a man who had boarded the train just before it left the station. He started telling me what he thought of women traveling on their own. Then he sat down by me and said he was going to assault me.
I couldn’t get away from him – but I could pray. I reached out to God to feel His presence and His reign of harmony, to see and acknowledge the kingdom of heaven at hand. I affirmed that nothing could separate me from God’s great love.
The big “aha” moment was when I realized that not only was I inseparable from divine Love, but so was that man. I didn’t answer him but just kept praying with this new inspiration that he couldn’t be separated from the integrity and purity of God. As my fear drained away, the man suddenly stopped talking and moved back to another seat. He was responding to the real, God-given love and integrity that I was affirming. At the next station, a group of people got into the train car, and the rest of my journey was undisturbed.
Christian Science shows us that we can pivot from the false perception that evil is there to the reality that God, good, is the only presence and power. As we do this, we can pinpoint our real location more accurately than any three words in an app! We are forever in the kingdom of heaven.
Adapted from an article published in the June 8, 2026, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
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