Your ability to heal

Think you don’t have what it takes to heal as Jesus did? Think again. There isn’t anyone who doesn’t have it in them to heal, because there isn’t anyone who doesn’t have it in them to love as Jesus loved. It really is that simple.

I remember a time many years ago when this idea really hit home. It was during a family vacation when my then seven-year-old nephew and I were sharing a room. In the middle of the night I awoke to find that he’d had a heavy nosebleed. (His mother had told me earlier that this had been happening on an occasional basis.)

Rather than trying to wake him from a sound sleep to clean things up, I decided to take a few moments just to love my nephew. This included an earnest desire to see him as I knew God saw him, right then and there – not as a frail, matter-based mortal subject to nosebleeds, but as God’s wholly spiritual, dearly beloved child.

To some that may sound like little more than positive thinking. But it really is a potent form of prayer. It was also a welcome reminder of the presence and power of Christ, the divine message from God that assures us that we have nothing to fear – that there isn’t any situation where God is not looking after us, where He’s not loving us. If this was true for me, as I understood it to be, then it was true for my nephew as well.

I must have fallen asleep, as the next thing I knew it was morning and my nephew had already made his way to breakfast. As I walked into the kitchen, I heard his mom ask how he’d slept. “Great,” he said, without even a mention, or any apparent memory, of what had happened. I was told later that soon after, these nosebleeds came to an end.

So what had happened here? Was this just about me entertaining a few loving thoughts about my nephew and seeing something amazing happen as a result? I don’t think so. To borrow a phrase from the New Testament (see, for instance, Matthew 14:14), I would describe it instead as my being “moved with compassion” – being inspired by God to see something of the inherent innocence of God’s creation – as my reflecting, in some measure, the love of divine Love itself, God, which enables us all to see this same reflection of Love in others.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered the divine Science behind the healings that we read about in the Bible – and that point to our own ability to heal – writes, “As the reflection of yourself appears in the mirror, so you, being spiritual, are the reflection of God. The substance, Life, intelligence, Truth, and Love, which constitute Deity, are reflected by His creation; and when we subordinate the false testimony of the corporeal senses to the facts of Science, we shall see this true likeness and reflection everywhere” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 516).

And, I might add, in everyone.

Of course, no one was better at this than Christ Jesus. Jesus loved; therefore, Jesus healed. But it was less about what Jesus was thinking, or even what he was saying, than about the love of God he was reflecting, the purity of God’s creation he was seeing, and the curative effect that such a divinely inspired view had on others.

So it is with us. In proportion to our commitment to love as Jesus did, our capacity to heal as Jesus did will increase.

Now, loving others as completely and consistently as Jesus did isn’t always easy. There are times when we don’t feel we have the patience to love, or we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that there are those who just aren’t worthy of love. Although such less-than-loving thoughts may seem normal, even justifiable, whatever resistance we might be feeling to thinking and acting in accord with our all-loving creator is actually unnatural.

“We love because God first loved us,” it says in the Bible (I John 4:19, Common English Bible), the implication being that our impulse to love and, by association, our ability to heal are compelled by a power that can’t be resisted. Sometimes all it takes to jump-start a healing is to be reminded of this fact.

Where there is love, there is no fear, declares the writer of First John (see 4:18). And where there’s no fear, there’s healing.

Adapted from an article published in the May 13, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.