Mike loves to sit on Mom's lap and sing with her. His favorite song is by Mary Baker Eddy. It begins, "Shepherd, show me how to go...." ^{Christian Science Hymnal, No. 304.} Mom and Mike have a special rocking chair they sit in to sing together.

One day Mike's nursery school teacher told Mom to watch Mike. Other children were sick, Miss Robin said.

Mom thought to herself, "Mike really is God's perfect child. God does not make him sick. Mike reflects God, so he can't be sick and neither can the other children. Miss Robin loves Mike and wants only good things for him." Mom prayed to see clearly that everyone in the class was truly God's perfect child. So nothing bad could come to Mike or the other children.

That night Mike crawled up in Mom's lap. He wasn't feeling well. He didn't sing much. When Mom sang "Shepherd, show me how to go," Mike said, "Sing it again, Mom." So Mom sang it several more times.

The words are beautiful. It's lovely to think of God as our Shepherd. It's good to listen for His voice telling us we are whole and all right.

Mike and Mom were good listeners. They wanted to follow the Shepherd. After a while Mike climbed down from Mom's lap. He went to sleep in his bed. He was fine the next morning.

Mike was looking forward to seeing Miss Robin. After nursery school Miss Robin said, "Mike has been so good today."

Parent's note:

When I silently thought, "Mike is God's perfect child," I based my reasoning on Matthew 5:48, which is Christ Jesus' command to be perfect, "even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Mrs. Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, says, "God is the creator of man, and, the divine Principle of man remaining perfect, the divine idea or reflection, man, remains perfect." ^{Science and Health, p. 470.} As we sang the hymn together I thought, "How can I listen better to the Father? How can I still my thought and feel the calm that goes hand in hand with perfect health?"

I knew that in the allness of God there was no sickness, fear or discord. So fear could not draw my thought back to symptoms of disease or mesmerize me to believe that Mike might get some disease that was going around at school. I also needed to declare the spiritual perfection of everyone at school and in the neighborhood, as God's children.

Mrs. Eddy writes: "Common consent is contagious, and it makes disease catching.

"People believe in infectious and contagious diseases, and that any one is liable to have them under certain predisposing or exciting causes. This mental state prepares one to have any disease whenever there appear the circumstances which he believes produce it. If he believed as sincerely that health is catching when exposed to contact with healthy people, he would catch their state of feeling quite as surely and with better effect than he does the sick man's." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 228–229.}

Finally, after all was thought and prayed and sung, I could see that Mike's inherent goodness as the child of God, Love, was definitive. Of course he was well! I love the way children are receptive to truth and love. They yield so quickly to the truth that God's children—all of us, really—are sinless and Godlike, not impressionable and vulnerable. The true immortal selfhood of each of us, parent as well as child, does come through as we listen more to God.