The spiritual meaning of a “perfect 10”!

My friend’s a perfect 10.

She found out yesterday.

Now perhaps you’re thinking Bo Derek in the movie “10”. And maybe you’re further thinking that a church meeting and being the apple of Dudley Moore’s lustful eye doesn’t seem like a match made in heaven.

You’re right!

This “perfect 10” has everything to do with happiness and satisfaction but nothing to do with sensuality.

Quite simply, my friend had agreed to take part in a survey on policing and was asked a series of questions to which she had to choose various “response options”.

The session culminated in some background questions about the interviewee, and the last of those was one my friend found it particularly easy to respond to.

“On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied and happy are you with your life?”

She answered “10”.

“And how happy were you yesterday?”

Once again she immediately offered a “10”.

The interviewer was astonished. He’d asked countless people the same questions during the previous year and she was the first to answer ‘ten’ to both queries.

After sharing that little ditty with us, my friend added that she had no doubt why she was able to unflinchingly offer those two tens. It wasn’t because her life was without hard challenges. It was a result of her spiritual life — the consciousness of her relationship to the Divine which she had been taught in childhood but had more recently rekindled.

“ I am very grateful to know that every day is a ‘10’,” she told us at a Christian Science Wednesday evening meeting — where we were gathered together to share ideas from our spiritual experiences following thoughtful readings from sacred texts. (The Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.)

No one else in the church that evening had taken the same survey, but many of us could understand her responses to those questions on satisfaction and happiness.

That’s not to say faithfully following a spiritual path is a bed of roses. Challenges are encountered and there’s an underlying and constant demand to improve one’s character through spiritual growth. But addressing a challenge through the understanding of an all-supporting and powerful divine Love, and striving to express that love more each day, are both deeply rewarding things to do. So the overriding sense is one of joy and wellbeing.

Saying that wouldn’t surprise board-certified OB/GYN physician and author Christiane Northrup, MD. She recommends the health benefits of relating to the Divine. Or at least she would if the press would let her!

When asked to provide a list of heath tips for “a well-known women’s publication” the editor wanted her to come up with a list of things like cutting back on sugar, drinking more water, and having good friends. She was happy to include those, but also mentioned it was important to have a relationship with the Divine.

The editor’s response? “We’re a traditional magazine. And talking about God is a little far out for our readers.”

Instead, Dr. Northrup was asked to replace getting to know God with “get regular checkups”, she wrote in her most recent book, “Goddesses Never Age”.

She continued: “Now, keep in mind that regular checkups have not been found to improve health! And 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God. But a magazine editor doesn’t want to ‘go there’ because we’ve been taught to put spirituality in one box and health in another.”

Like both my friend and Dr. Northrup, many have found that far from belonging in distinct boxes, spirituality and well-being overlap. And that’s wonderful because it means our health is not beyond our control. We can seek the spiritual understanding of who we are as the creation of a good God and make a difference in how we feel.

In that Wednesday evening church meeting an idea was shared of how to do that.

“Soul has infinite resources with which to bless mankind, and happiness would be more readily attained and would be more secure in our keeping, if sought in Soul” was read from Science and Health — which one member described as “a book of tens”.

In this sentence Soul means God, the spiritual substance of our lives that we become increasingly aware of as we leave behind a more limiting, material sense of life and mind.

As we each do this it could well help us all to consider proffering that hallowed number “10” when asked, How satisfied and happy are you with your life?

This was first published on Medium.com as “Happiness and satisfaction guaranteed? Get to know God!”