Healing through prayer

A while back, I damaged something internally by overstretching when reaching up for a heavy object and lifting it off a high shelf. Not a sensible thing to do, in hindsight! But what was done was done. I didn’t know what I’d damaged, because I didn’t seek a medical opinion. I did know, though, that something inside started feeling very painful, and grew more painful throughout the afternoon until, early in the evening, I found myself saying out loud, “This is unbearable!”

The reason I hadn’t sought a medical opinion is that I had been introduced to Christian Science many years ago when I was in my 20s and had become used to trusting my needs for care and cure to prayer, based on God’s love and power. So that is what I was very naturally doing – anticipating that the divine intelligence of God could provide me with a healing idea that would restore the physical harmony that, at that moment, seemed lost.

Within minutes of saying, “This is unbearable,” I was sitting at my desk, virtually free of the pain. What had changed?

Divine intelligence did give me a healing idea. It was this: that the very thought “this is unbearable” was not what it seemed to be. It was not a thought sent to me from my body about a legitimate physical cause. Rather, it was a message being conveyed to my body by what the Bible calls “the carnal mind” (Rom. 8:7), which believes all existence is merely material, and that health is at the mercy of circumstances. This mentality included the anticipation of suffering. Through Christian Science, though, I had learned of a spiritual perspective that is accurate and true: Health is actually at the mercy of a good, loving, and totally pure divine Mind, or God, which is continuously revealing the eternally established, and indestructible well-being that all God’s sons and daughters reflect. In short, health, comfort, and peace are natural; pain and suffering are not.

I glimpsed that true consciousness belongs to the divine Mind and comes from that Mind alone. And that this consciousness is for the awareness and expression of God’s well-being, not for entertaining a sense of suffering. I prayed to acknowledge and accept thoughts of good from God as everyone’s thoughts – and as my only thoughts. When I did so, the pain left.

In her insightful book on such healing, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science, explained it this way: “The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus’ time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation. Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural” (p. xi).

Needless to say, I was grateful for the physical relief. More than that, though, I took away a renewed sense of what I can express: the celebration and glorification of God’s ceaseless and boundless goodness.

That glory exudes health!

For a Danish translation of this article, see The Herald of Christian Science.

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