Sometimes the simple affirmation of God's goodness and the emptiness of all claims of evil, deeply felt and specifically related to some illness, will quickly heal. But what if the problem seems to hang on, or to only half diminish? That's not the time to give in. It's a call to extend our understanding of God, Love, and of man, God's expression. And, correlatively, to have that understanding seen to be modifying our character as it spiritualizes our thought.

Love is always an element in healing, because God is Love, and it is God that heals. God's love lasts. Sin and disease express the mortal belief that God's love has lapsed or doesn't exist. But God's love never fluctuates. It never ebbs or flows, though our sense of it may. If we're up against a resistant error, then perhaps we should review what we truly comprehend of Love. There is no such thing as loveless Christian Science treatment. There is no one who, in his God-expressing selfhood, is outside the circumference of Love. There is no one who lacks the ability to progressively prove this if he is willing to accept and live by the stringent demands of Truth.

Sometimes, while we're attributing resistance to the belief, it is we ourselves who are doing the resisting—resisting the love of Love and also the imperatives of Truth. And Truth not only demands that we reason from perfection rather than imperfection; it demands also that we live the Christly life that makes clear the qualities of divine Love.

A belief may persist because we haven't really faced up to our fear of the claim and grappled with it, dismissing that fear on spiritual grounds. God's love is truly irresistible. We can't really hold it off, even should we try. And fear can't hold back love. As spiritual love and affection outweigh resentment and indifference, fear of matter—and of what it might do to us—comes under control.

Thoroughly proving the impotence of a particular belief may seem to take a span of months or even longer. But all the while we are persisting with spiritual truth, even if in the face of little encouraging evidence of healing, our conviction is deepening and broadening. (It was five years before I overcame a particular trouble. At the time, I would have given a lot to have been excused from the battle. But conviction in the truth largely stems from such persistence and the resolution of problems that results. And this was a priceless phase for me.)

In healing the resistant illness, we may need to deal with mankind's general false assumptions about man and substance—that both are material. Are we harboring a lurking belief in the power of matter to heal matter through drugs? The point about a resistant belief is that it is belief. That's where the emphasis should be. Pharmacy can never remove the belief in physicality. But Love, understood and lived, can and does.

Christ Jesus showed us the way, even to the extent of overcoming that belief which would seem to be ultimately resistant: death. Our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, notes, "Jesus said: 'I knew that Thou hearest me always;' and he raised Lazarus from the dead, stilled the tempest, healed the sick, walked on the water." And she adds the encouragement to us, "There is divine authority for believing in the superiority of spiritual power over material resistance." ^{Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 134.}

We can prove that superiority. But in doing so there may come a point where we need to call a Christian Science practitioner to help us. A practitioner is someone experienced in proving the fallacy of the mortal beliefs of sickness and sin, whether apparently short-term or longtime. God's love, expressed both to us and to the practitioner through the Christ, will lead us to see what needs facing up to and denying. It will lead us to see what truths need our affirming, and what regeneration is needed to break the argument that man is a mortal and suffering from material conditions.

That there is anything, anywhere—either a claim or a material condition—that can resist divine Love is itself a belief. Each healing, or each step taken toward healing, helps to expose and undercut that belief. Therefore, we don't have to be self-absorbed or self-pitying during the resolving of a problem. Our working out of it is a way of loving mankind. We are not doing the work for ourselves alone.

What if we feel worn down? Mortal mind and its tedious argument of life in matter is spurious. We can have the spiritual energy, conviction, understanding, and inspiration to press on because divine Love is always available to us. And our Leader writes: "The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in truth through flood-tides of Love. Christian perfection is won on no other basis." ^{Ibid., p. 201.}

Those "flood-tides of Love" keep us confident and single-minded at all points in our working out of the problem of being. Those tides carry away our discouragement and doubts. They bring with them whatever refreshment we need.

Sometimes what we need is to see and feel the simplest of simple truths—for example, that Spirit will never let us down. At other times we may need to grapple with deeper truths—passages in the Bible or the writings of Mrs. Eddy—whose spiritual meaning has always seemed to elude us. But whatever divine fact we are pondering, we need to go beyond just thinking about it to truly admitting its import and power.

What will endure well beyond any claim of disease is God's love. It is already here in its fullness, and is made clear to us through the Christ. Because God's care has never faltered, man's wholeness has never been impaired, his perfection has never faded. This is the truth that will lead us to heal the resistant belief. And to prove that God's love, expressed in our love, is invincible.

GEOFFREY J. BARRATT