Article April 4, 1994 Issue

Symptoms and suggestions

Evidence of disease has no legitimacy, and the power of God enables you to destroy it.

Harriet Barry Schupp

Sometimes we're inclined to think that everything we see or hear is fact. But some of what comes to our attention is only suggestion. The world generally treats symptoms as indicating the presence of disease or disorder in the body—in other words, as a concrete fact. If we accept this view, our first reaction to a symptom may be fear and the thought "What is this?"

But feelings of disorder or other indications of disease do not spring from God, who is the only creator, the sole governor of man's being. In a profound sense, then, they're not facts. God, Truth, is the only lawgiver, and His laws express His pure nature as Love, the divine Principle of existence. God is not the source of disorder; His action is wholly harmonious. In ever-present divine Love there are no elements of inharmony manifesting themselves as symptoms of disease. Thus we are free to uproot such symptoms, immediately and with authority, by rejecting them as false suggestions that we have allowed to take root in our thought. These symptoms, or suggestions, have no basis in spiritual truth.

Didn't Christ Jesus prove this when confronted with evidence of disease? He was able to heal the epileptic boy, the leper, Peter's mother-in-law, who was suffering with fever, because he understood that these conditions were neither created nor sanctioned by God. What Jesus was hearing, seeing, knowing, was what God was revealing to him of God's own spotless, harmonious creation. And this perception of the creator's spiritual, perfect man right where a diseased mortal seemed to be enabled the Master to recognize symptoms as suggestions, which he rejected and uprooted. The result was healing.

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