Parasites can't feed on you

"We need to remove from our thought whatever would sap our vitality and liveliness."

By Barbara Thiel Johnson

On A Winter day looking across a Texas field, I saw that some trees were bare while others were rich with green foliage. As I looked closer, I realized the green was not the trees' foliage; it was mistletoe hanging in the trees. My eyes had tricked me!

Mistletoe is classified as semiparasitic because it sends suckerlike roots into and beneath the bark of certain kinds of trees, drawing water and nutriments from them. Eventually, it will take over an entire tree, sapping the tree of life unless it is thoroughly removed from the tree. Like arborists charged with the removal of mistletoe from an infested tree, we need to remove from our thought whatever would sap our vitality and liveliness. We don't have to play host to it or let it get under our skin.

A spiritual fact of life is that we are God's likeness; nothing can be taken from our actual perfection and completeness. All that divine Love gives is already and always ours. Divine Love does not deplete or strip away; it gives, gives, gives, and then gives some more. Mary Baker Eddy writes, "God creates man perfect and eternal in His own image. Hence man is the image, idea, or likeness of perfection—an ideal which cannot fall from its inherent unity with divine Love, from its spotless purity and original perfection" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 262). Material misconceptions of life cannot hang on to us or sap our sense of wholeness and purity. The truth of man's unity with God gives us the wisdom with which to clear out of thought every belief in the power of lack, contagion, or infection.

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