You are worthy of healing
WHEN I was growing up, one of my uncles used to stop at our house a couple of times a week to visit. My brothers and sisters and I loved seeing him. He didn't bounce us on his knee, buy us presents, or take us out for ice cream. We liked seeing him simply because he was kind. He was gentle and modest, a good man. During one of his visits, though, he said something that made me sad. He and another adult in the family were talking, and he said that while he believed in God's healing power, he didn't think he was good enough to experience that power. I didn't have the courage to speak up then, but I remember thinking that if he wasn't good enough, nobody was!
Intuitively I felt that God's blessings are available to everyone, not just a chosen few. And in coming years my own spiritual progress confirmed the rightness of that intuition, as I learned from experience that God's impartial love, and not a personal sense of worthiness, effects regeneration and healing.
I'm a Christian Scientist, and throughout my life I've been healed of many kinds of troubles by trusting God's power. These healings have taught me more about God as Love than mere words ever could. They have also indicated to me that Christian healing really is a matter of God's grace, available to all, because I still have much to learn about being a true Christian and have made mistakes. Yet that hasn't kept God from helping me when I needed help. In fact, the physical healings I cherish most are those in which God's unconditional love has destroyed some phase of sin in my thought and freed me to express more fully man's pure, spiritual nature.
The human mind tends to run in extremes. People sometimes indulge in evil and fail to see and correct the wrongdoing, or they try hard to be good yet suffer from chronic feelings of unworthiness. Either state of thought, unchecked, would block spiritual healing by focusing attention on a falsity -- belief in a personal sense of selfhood apart from God. Making too much or too little of sin affirms our belief in the legitimacy and power of evil, a belief that must ultimately surrender to an understanding of the allness of God, good. Eventually we learn what a freeing thing it is to give up the self-oriented tendencies of the human mind and yield to what God knows of man -- yield to the reality of our God-given spiritual perfection. Then we're able to move forward with a balanced view. We neither condemn nor justify the human sense of self. We let the Christ, the divine healing influence, tell us what we need to know and make us new.
The teachings of Christian Science reiterate the remarkable message brought to earth through the life of Christ Jesus -- that the might of infinite Love is always more irresistible than a lifelong handicap, a stubborn disease, or a sinful past. Healing is the natural outcome of God's overflowing love for man. It is God's gift to everyone, irrespective of how worthy or unworthy one may feel. Jesus said of his Father, ``He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.''1
Healing shows us who we really are. It is heaven's reassurance that beyond the troublesome, erroneous sense of material existence lies the actual reality of man's being -- life in and of Spirit, eternally harmonious, thoroughly good, and indestructible. We gain glimpses, through healing, that man is neither a miserable sinner nor a hopeless sufferer. We find out that we belong to God and are under His care. Yet how willing are we to admit that we are worthy of His saving grace in times of sickness?
Sometimes it is not until things become desperate that we are willing to give God a serious chance to help us and change us.Then we are ready to set aside endless despair over our inadequacies and turn to God to see what He knows of us. After all, it is who we are as His spiritual offspring, not what we appear to be humanly, that is the reason healing is possible to each of us. And when we are willing to turn to Him in humility, willing to admit that we are worthy of healing, we have done much. We have grown childlike, receptive. We are willing to be loved by Him, ready to be blessed.
In the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy,2 you can read more about Christian healing. In the first chapter, entitled ``Prayer,'' we find this: ``In divine Science, where prayers are mental, all may avail themselves of God as `a very present help in trouble.'''3 And that, of course, includes you.
1Matthew 5:45. 2The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. 3Science and Health, pp. 12-13. DAILY BIBLE VERSE: Ye are blessed of the Lord which made heaven and earth. Psalms 115:15
