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Trust the healing
Sometimes when we are working through and praying about a challenge, we may feel frustrated or even fearful if we don’t get the healing results we are hoping for right away. It is most important at those times to keep working, keep praying, and trust that our prayers are effective, no matter how bleak the human picture may appear—knowing that God’s law is in operation, actively working to bless us.
This point came home to me in a very clear and unexpected way last fall when I took an all-day private workshop on oil painting. Since I was a novice, my instructor patiently taught me how to first make a general charcoal sketch, just getting the basic shapes of my subject. Then, after I learned about the color wheel, she taught me the next step of determining the values of light and shading—filling those into the drawing using a combination of white and marine blue paints, simply getting the light and shadows of the painting correct. When that process was done we moved on to working with colors to complete the painting. Under my instructor’s tutelage, I was able to finish a fairly decent little seascape that day.
When I got home, I was eager to pull out some photographs I had taken while hiking the old Tokaido Highway in Japan (now a beautiful path through the hills and forest), and I selected a favorite photo I had taken of one of the little post towns still standing from that era. It showed a lovely street sloping downward, shaded by trees, backed by mountains, and lined with the old traditional buildings, with a lone couple walking down the street. The lady held a red Japanese umbrella to shade herself from the sun. I decided to try out my new painting skills using this photograph as my subject.
I got out my easel and brushes and supplies and began the process as I had been taught: sketching in the general basic shapes with my charcoal, and then determining the light values and painting them in with my combinations of white and marine blue.
I had been concentrating and working for quite a while and stopped for a moment to view my work. And I realized that my painting just looked like a big mess!
Here I’d had great visions of myself as this terrific artist, and instead there was just this blobs-of-paint conglomeration in front of me. I had to laugh at myself, and even though it looked awful, I decided to press onward and work through the process as I had been instructed. I thought it would be a good learning experience.
When I finished the light and shading part, I decided to stop work for the day with intentions to continue the following day. I cleaned my brushes, stood up, stepped back, and turned on some lights in my living room as it was almost evening.
When I turned around and glanced back at the painting, I couldn’t believe my eyes! The lovely street, the trees, the mountains and the buildings, and the lady with her umbrella—everything was all clearly there in my painting! It had looked like a mess before because I had been sitting too close to it to see the whole picture.
Then I remembered that my instructor had told me during the day that the painting might not look right at first, but that I just needed to trust the process. It had been such a full day that I had forgotten her words until I experienced what she was talking about.
This experience taught me an important lesson about patience and diligence, and about trusting the process instead of what I was “seeing” in front of my face! (I didn’t give up and throw out the picture. And I didn’t try to redo it according to my human viewpoint. I stayed with the process I had been taught.) In Christian Science healing, sometimes a challenge feels too close and personal to us. We need at those times not to worry about the not-so-good picture that may be in front of our eyes, but to trust instead that healing can and must result as we let go of the material picture and fill in the values of divine spiritual light and understanding about God and man.
Then, after we have persistently and faithfully done our work, we can stand back and behold God’s perfect and beautiful design.
—Judy Woodson, Palm Desert, California