Last Wednesday, my friend and Sunday school teacher, Horton Foote, passed on to a new experience. Horton Foote was an accomplished playwright and screenwriter. But this tribute is not about Horton's Academy Awards and Pulitzer Prize. It's about a deep spiritual thinker who still inspires me in my ministry.

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For eight years during my high school and college days, Horton Foote taught me in his Sunday school class at First Church of Christ, Scientist in Manchester. He was a gentle, genuine man who radiated love. His students actually looked forward to Sunday school and the occasional visits to his antique farmhouse in New Boston.

It's said that action speaks louder and does more for children than words. What you are is more important than what you say. Even though Horton was an inspired thinker and writer, he was a humble man of few, yet direct, words in his class. Those words were remembered and helpful to his students after class.

Horton Foote epitomized grace. I didn't fully appreciate this 35 years ago. Today, I still strive for his simple sincerity. Such grace comes to us from a higher source than human thought.

Inspiration is one helpful lesson I learned from Horton Foote. He taught that inspiration came from the heart and from a spiritual source he called divine love. You felt it in his presence. Love inspired Horton's writing, and it's what made him such an animated example to his students.

In our class, he often quoted from the book of Ecclesiastes: "Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it." With this simple truth, Horton would remind us that God's work is complete, yet unfolding to each of us individually in our thoughts and lives.

I think closest to his heart and life was this statement from the Christian Science textbook "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by New Hampshire author Mary Baker Eddy: "Love inspires, illumines, designates, and leads the way. Right motives give pinions to thought, and strength and freedom to speech and action." This profound truth was the key to Horton Foote's success as an author and teacher. It was helpful to me as a high school athlete, and it helps me today in my ministry.

There was something else even more profound that uplifted and healed me many times right in that Sunday school classroom. Horton taught us that God is good and knows only goodness. When I went to him with a problem, he would ask me, "What does God know of this?" As I pondered this question, a light would turn on in my thinking that turned off the darkness and brought healing to the situation.

If you would like to learn more of Horton Foote's spirituality and what really inspired him, you can visit your local Christian Science Reading Room and look up an interview with him published in the July 2006 Christian Science Journal. Horton's life story is summed up here: www.csmonitor.com/2009/0306/p08s02-cogn.html.

George Reed of Bow is a Christian Science practitioner and the spokesman for the Christian Science church in New Hampshire.