Inherit health

A family member had some cherished possessions she wanted us to retain as heirlooms. So in her later years we all heard a lot about the pair of Venetian glass vases, the Weiman table, and so on.

Settling her estate required an appraisal of her valuables. It was then that we learned the vases were not Venetian and the table not as valuable as Weiman.

After our initial disappointment when each ''treasure'' was pronounced a trinket, we all had a good laugh and divided the keepsakes among us because we treasured her. She had not deliberately deceived us about the items, but someone along the line certainly had deceived her about their authenticity! And because she prized them, we had, too.

How often do we accept deceptions as realities just because others have accepted them? For example, have we been deceived into thinking we're liable to a hereditary defect attributed to an ancestor who accepted its validity? Yet in God's eternal, spiritual creation, including His perfect family of man, imperfection is invalid. Christ Jesus' teachings and healing works vividly confirm this fact.

The estate appraiser had acquainted herself so thoroughly with genuine quality that she was not deceived by worthless copies. Likewise, acquaintance with God and His genuine, perfect offspring alerts us to detect and reject a counterfeit, material sense of man as subject to defect and disease.

By teaching me that in our true nature we are all God's children, therefore Godlike, Christian Science helped me halt the hereditary hoax in two deeply moving ways. When an uncomfortable condition that had long troubled my mother began to take form in my body, I vigorously challenged the theory of unhealthy hereditary tendencies. I reasoned that if God is the only parent or creator, as the Scriptures declare He is, then His children can inherit only His nature, substance, and qualities. I accepted health as my heritage. But I still wasn't healed.

Before long it dawned on me that I must accept health as everyone's eternal heritage and history. Then I was healed. And I heard no more about that ailment from my family.

Meeting that acute hereditary disorder encouraged me to confront a chronic condition of myopia - just what Daddy had. When I took the glasses off from my memory of him, stopped identifying him with that ailment, I was able to remove my own glasses, too, and see clearly without them.

Without mind to direct it, mindless matter can't really originate or perpetuate anything. Before we mentally program ourselves to be heirs of disease and defect, we should carefully appraise what they really are. Is suffering an heirloom of spiritual sense, or merely a hand-me-down of deceitful material sense?

And what of us? Are we derived from lying material sense? Are we the children and heirs of God, or of each other? ''The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God,'' the Bible tells us. ''And if children , then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.''n1 Understanding that each individual is actually a reflection, a complete representation, of the one infinite cause in which perfect health inheres, we gain dominion over our experience.

n1 Romans 8:16

The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, urges us to exercise our God-given dominion. She writes: ''No person can accept another's belief, except it be with the consent of his own belief. If the error which knocks at the door of your own thought originated in another's mind, you are a free moral agent to reject or to accept this error; hence, you are the arbiter of your own fate, and sin is the author of sin.''n2

n2Miscellaneous writings,m p. 83

The truth is that God made only good. He did not make anything evil, material , or mortal. Disease and deformity appear only in a material sense of man. This dream sense progressively disappears as we awake to divine reality, healing by healing, and as we urge the reality of truth in Christianized living.

The truth is that we are joint-heirs of absolute harmony. We have all inherited perfect health. Are you claiming your inheritance? DAILY BIBLE VERSE Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. Matthew 5:48