Living From the Inside Out: Choosing Life When Everything Feels Drained

Have you ever hit that point where you think, “I’m just… done”?
Not in a dramatic way. Just tired. Inside-tired. Like the well ran dry and you’re still expected to keep pouring.

This week’s Bible Lesson on Life quietly blows up the idea that life is a limited personal battery you have to protect, fix, or manage. It points to Life as something radically different. Not in your body, not trapped in your history, not measured in years or diagnoses, but in God. As in, “In him we live, and move, and have our being,” not “in my hormones, my stress level, and my bank account.”​

That’s a big shift. And honestly, it can feel absurd at first. Because it really sounds like, “Ignore your problems and pretend everything’s spiritual and fine.” But that’s not what’s going on here at all.

The lesson starts by tying Life directly to God. Life as infinite, not material or finite. Life as universal good, not “some days good, some days trash.”​

Mary Baker Eddy flat-out says that when being is understood, Life is seen as neither material nor finite, “but as infinite, as God, universal good,” and the belief that life or mind was ever in a finite form gets destroyed. That is so rude to everything we’ve been taught about biology. And also… strangely freeing.​

Because if Life is actually infinite, then the stuff that screams “your life is deteriorating” is not the final narrator. The Psalmist says God “forgives all your iniquities” and “heals all your diseases,” and “redeems your life from the Pit.” That’s not a poetic participation trophy. That’s a full-on challenge to the narrative that your life is slowly being used up or eaten away.​

And if your knee-jerk response is, “Okay but… reality?”, that’s fair. This is precisely what this lesson keeps poking at: which “reality” is getting the microphone?

There’s this scene from Exodus in the lesson that feels very “2026 energy.” The people are in the wilderness, thirsty, and finally find water. Except the water is bitter, undrinkable. They complain. Moses cries out to God. God shows him a piece of wood. Moses throws it into the water. The water becomes sweet.​

If you read that literally, it’s a weird old miracle story. If you read it through this Life lens, it’s a picture of consciousness shifting.

Mary Baker Eddy quotes the question, “Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?” and uses it to argue that if God is all, how can there be anything outside that allness, or a separate reality of lack, bitterness, and death? She calls the belief that life and intelligence are in matter “an error.”​

Basically: if you start with “Life is in matter,” you will keep running into bitter wells. If you start with “Life is God,” it doesn’t erase the wilderness, but it transforms the experience. The harshness loses its authority. The same “place” in thought can’t honestly hold both “God is all” and “I’m doomed.”

This isn’t positivity culture. It’s a totally different premise.

One of my favorite parts of the lesson is that Joel promise: “I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” The lost years. The wrecked seasons. The “where did my life go?” moments.​

Then you get that story of the Shunammite woman. Elisha had restored her son to life. Later there’s a famine. She leaves. Seven years go by. When she comes back, her land is technically gone. She goes to the king to appeal. And just as he’s hearing about Elisha’s works, she walks in with her son. The king orders that everything be restored, plus the revenue from the fields the entire time she was gone.​

Not just “you can have your property back.” But the missed yield. The “lost good” returned.

Mary Baker Eddy pairs this with the idea that when we realize Life is Spirit, not in nor of matter, “this understanding will expand into self-completeness, finding all in God, good, and needing no other consciousness.” That’s her way of saying: you are not living a half-life, trying to claw back what was lost. Life, as God, is whole. And you reflect that wholeness.​

So those years you feel were stolen by illness, grief, bad choices? This lens says: the core of your Life was never actually damaged. And that’s not spiritual gaslighting. It’s a different starting point for healing.

Deuteronomy drops this pretty blunt line: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.” Jesus later frames this as the narrow way that leads to life, while the wide way heads to destruction.​

The lesson isn’t saying “act morally so you don’t get punished.” It’s deeper. Life or death here is not just about breathing or not breathing. It’s about which premise you live from.

Mary Baker Eddy ties “loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind” to surrendering “all merely material sensation, affection, and worship.” She calls this “the Science of Life.” Science. Not vague mysticism. The logic is: if God, Spirit, is Life, then treating matter as the source and controller of life will always feel off. Like using a broken compass.​

We reverse our “feeble flutterings” after life in matter, she says, and rise above the testimony of the material senses “to the immortal idea of God.” That’s her way of saying: stop chasing your aliveness in stuff that keeps proving fragile. Start from what actually lasts.​

That path is narrow, because it cuts through about 95% of what the world tells you to trust.

Then there’s that wild scene with the Canaanite woman. Her daughter is tormented. She begs Jesus to help. He initially answers in a way that sounds harsh. She doesn’t back down. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” He tells her, “Great is your faith,” and her daughter is healed instantly.​

Later in the same section, you see Jesus feeding a massive crowd with seven loaves and a few fish in the desert. Everyone eats. There are baskets of leftovers. Plenty, spilling over.​

You also get Jesus crying out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me,” and promising that whoever believes will have “rivers of living water” flowing from within. He’s not offering bottled spirituality. He’s pointing to a source of Life that wells up from inside, not delivered from outside.​

Mary Baker Eddy says “We all must learn that Life is God.” She also says Christ, the true spiritual idea, is “here and everywhere,” and that when Christ changes a belief of sin or sickness into a better belief, that belief melts into spiritual understanding and sin, disease, and death disappear. It’s a transformation of consciousness that shows up practically.​

Her picture of real Christianity is not fragile religion. It is “the rich in spirit” helping the poor “in one grand brotherhood,” and the one who sees a brother’s need and supplies it, “seeking his own in another’s good.” Life as shared abundance, not private survival.​

The lesson finishes with this gem: “One moment of divine consciousness, or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love, is a foretaste of eternity.” Not one lifetime. One moment. When that view is obtained and retained, she says, it would “bridge over with life discerned spiritually the interval of death,” and we’d be in “the full consciousness of immortality and eternal harmony.”​

Then she almost casually says, “Life is eternal. We should find this out, and begin the demonstration thereof.”​

Not: argue about it. Not: memorize it. Demonstrate it.

So how does that even start?

• Notice when your thought quietly assumes life is in your body, bank account, success, or relationships

• Gently challenge that: “If Life is God, is that really where my safety or identity lives?”

• Let yourself get curious about where you’ve seen restoration that didn’t make sense on paper

• Practice letting divine Love, not fear, define your value and your prospects

You’re not being asked to fake positivity or deny pain. You’re invited to let a different definition of Life sit at the center, and see what that does to how you walk through your “wilderness,” your “locust years,” your “bitter water.”

So here’s the question to sit with this week:

If my life is actually in God, not in matter, what would I stop fearing… and what would I dare to expect?