Better understanding of God heals blemish

For as long as I can remember, my medicine of choice has been prayer. Reaching out with my heart to hear and feel God all around me—not just bringing me comfort, but actually removing pain and sickness.

However, I couldn't seem to leave facial blemishes alone. And a lump on my face would reappear in spite of my somewhat halfhearted prayers—and sometimes aggressive attempts—to remove it. Because it had a blackness in the center, I was convinced the lump covered something that I could remove if I could just get to it, which somehow justified what I was doing.

Last winter the spot began to enlarge. At the same time, a particularly difficult relationship was calling me to pray about negative traits I was seeing in myself and another person. As a result, I'd been giving a lot of thought to the idea that God creates His children spiritually—without any physicality, or human temperament. I felt I needed to get "right" with God, and what came to me to do as I prayed each day was to consider the idea that I had no mortal identity on which to hang any mistake, negative personality trait, or sickness, because God had given me—and everyone—a perfect, spiritual identity. This inspiration came from several statements I'd been studying in Science and Health, including: "The denial of material selfhood aids the discernment of man's spiritual and eternal individuality, and destroys the erroneous knowledge gained from matter or through what are termed the material senses" (p. 91).

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October 25, 2004
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