Health . How we value it! And when faced with sickness, how we desire to get health back! That can be done by realizing—making real to ourselves—the good that is already and eternally real to God. Sickness can be healed through understanding the power of God and the uninterrupted reality of His goodness.

God, divine Principle, is the only genuine source of being. All true conditions and qualities emanate from Him. There is no other source to conflict with the one true creator and thereby cause chaos. The health of His children is spiritual, not material. So it is not something that comes and goes. Nor is it a state in which we tenuously float, hoping it won't go away or be shattered by disease. Health is not a handout distributed unequally, so that some have it in abundance and others in gaunt scarcity. Nor can it be suddenly stolen. Also, it never depends on certain foods, material medicines, climate, or exercise.

Health is an attribute of God. Therefore, it is always present because God is always present. Health is substantial, strong, and vigorous. It is not evanescent but permanent. It expresses the allness and beneficence of the divine preserver of man. Health is an irrevocable gift from our loving Father-Mother.

God cannot be ill or injured, for He is not a fallible mortal. He is immortal Mind, indestructible Spirit, the fount of all that is good. Because He cannot be sick, His idea, man, cannot be sick. And that idea is the true selfhood of each one of us. Man is thus secure in perfect health forever. And this spiritual fact is provable now. Each of us can declare with complete conviction, based on God's authority, "Here and now, I unequivocally and indisputably claim my perfect health!"

A mistaken sense that God can be absent or that His creation is material and subject to harmful influences makes health appear to be unreliable. This false sense is reinforced if thought is distracted from good, preoccupied, for instance, with a symptom of disease or with a vivid description of some illness. If we are not alert, we may let in a feeling of alarm. Then divine Love seems distant. Matter is believed to have the floor and to be dictating conditions—even to be overpowering God. Health is obscured from this state of thought, and the body is apt to express this mental condition in some form of disease. Therefore, we must always be ready to eject sick or sinful thoughts from consciousness. As a ticket taker watches and dictates who will enter a theater and who won't, each of us decides what will enter thought and what won't. The carnal, or mortal, mind cannot force suggestions and pictures of disease into consciousness if we deny them entrance and allow only wholesome, spiritually right concepts to abide in thought.

It is important not only to deny error but to affirm the truth. The void created in the removal of evil from thought must be filled by our declarations and growing understanding of truth in order to realize health and keep evil from reappearing. For instance, we can deny that fear has any power because it is not of God, and then replace the fear by affirming—and realizing—that its opposite, Love, is present and all-power. The importance of replacing error with truth is clearly indicated in Christ Jesus' teaching. The Master warns us: "When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first" (Matt. 12:43—45).

I felt God's power and was able to realize the presence of health one night when I woke feeling nauseated. I had memorized a statement from that week's Bible Lesson, outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly, and had been applying its truth to the problems of the day. The statement, by Mary Baker Eddy, was this: "Divine Love is infinite. Therefore all that really exists is in and of God, and manifests His love" (Science and Health, p. 340). Those words were still with me, so I started repeating them right away. They so beautifully expressed the all-inclusive goodness of God's creation, ruling out any claim of evil.

My thought was perfectly calm. I paid close attention to the declaration I was repeating, especially the last part: "all that really exists is in and of God, and manifests His love." It was obvious that the nausea was not manifesting God's love. Therefore it didn't really exist. It could only be an illusive claim of mortal mind. I mentally turned away from the apparent condition of sickness, acknowledging the presence of Christ, Truth, and its health-giving power.

Though I still felt sick, I remained perfectly calm, mentally repeating and realizing the truth of my prayer, affirming Love's omnipotence and omnipresence. Suddenly, the nausea vanished. I felt fine. Because I had been affirming during the day the spiritual facts embodied in the statement from Science and Health, my thought was already strengthened to exclude fear and reject the suggestion of sickness. Therefore, the nausea had no basis in my thought for either acceptance or development. I was well.

Mrs. Eddy advises us: "Mentally insist that harmony is the fact, and that sickness is a temporal dream. Realize the presence of health and the fact of harmonious being, until the body corresponds with the normal conditions of health and harmony" (ibid., p. 412). Realizing the fact of harmony, in spite of the material evidence of discord, meant really believing what I was saying— understanding that I was already harmonious. Jesus affirmed the need to believe that prayer is answered. He put it this way: "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them" (Mark 11:24).

To realize health, we banish from thought all beliefs in its opposite and replace them with the spiritual facts of the presence of good. Harmony is realized once we see our situation from this correct standpoint. Discord has been made unreal to thought, and the body—the objectification of thought—corresponds to this spiritualization of consciousness. We are healed.

The appearance of disease symptoms does not mean that disease is a reality. Each symptom is merely a suggestion that God, good, is somehow, or to some degree, absent. But God, the All and Only, is by nature ever present. Human beings have given names to sets of symptoms. But God has never named a disease. Nor has He created one. In reality, then, disease can't exist because God hasn't created it.

Responding to suggestions of disease with acceptance, fear, or curiosity is all that can make disease seem powerful or real. Turning thought to divine Truth awakens us from the illusion of sickness and reveals the light of Christ, which heals.

The continual effort to keep our sight on spiritual truth, refusing to be impressed by material sense, helps us to realize God's presence quickly when a difficulty arises. But even with slower healings, holding fast to the truth of being moves us toward complete healing in the best possible way and prevents discouragement. Such spiritualization of thought enables us to realize health here and now.