Article May 1, 2000 Issue

Just perfect

Chronic asthma healed

By Colleen Douglass

During the summer and winter Olympics, millions are glued to the television, hoping to witness sheer athletic perfection in operation. We raise our voices to cheer a top performance on the parallel bars or to bemoan a slip on the ice or slightly off-balance high dive that robs our chosen athlete of that perfect score. We delight in perfection and applaud its achievement.

Though not very many of us would ever claim to have reached perfection, we recognize the importance of it when we watch the launch of a space shuttle or listen to a flawless presentation of a Mozart piano concerto. Few, however, realize that genuine perfection is a God-given right, not a hit-or-miss proposition. Spiritual perfection is the present state of reality. Just as the actual concerto Mozart conceived is perfect, so is the true image of each one of us as children of God. One's inability to play the perfect concerto doesn't deny its existence. It simply points to the need to bring one's thought, and thereby one's fingers, into line with the ideal. In this way, one serves as the instrument of music, rather than as its detriment.

Over one hundred years ago, Mary Baker Eddy discovered that understanding one's inherent spiritual perfection as the child of God provided the basis for healing disease. Her discovery evolved from deep prayer and her study of the life and works of the immaculate Christ Jesus. Her writings indicate that perfection points to what's true about man—a broad term for all of God's children, including both women and men—and that anything less than perfection would be impossible to the perfect God and, therefore, to His creation. In her textbook on healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she writes: "Perfection underlies reality. Without perfection, nothing is wholly real. All things will continue to disappear, until perfection appears and reality is reached" (p. 353).

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