Approaching "the scientific period"

ELAINE WALLER HUNTER

Only fourteen more days and we would leave on a long-planned vacation with our two nursery-schoolers. We'd walk beaches, explore islands, swim in warm water. But even as I was considering our trip, the children catapulted through the door, each waving a typed piece of paper—a note from their schoolteacher. It read, "Your child has been exposed to...." It named a so-called children's disease. "Please examine him carefully before sending him to nursery school each morning. The incubation period is fourteen days."

Fourteen days. Why now? I thought. I wish the school had never sent the note. I wish I didn't know. I wish .... But I caught myself. I could do better thinking than that. Here and now I had an opportunity to prove that Christian Science works to prevent as well as heal disease. So I stopped the wishful thinking and got to work, refuting the suggestions of disease that would frighten me.

"Your child ...." the note said. No, I reasoned, they are God's children, and no possessive, personal sense of parenthood can make me fear for their well-being, since they are the children of His care. Paul told the Athenians, "In him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring."^{Acts 17:28;}

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