Article October 10, 2005 Issue

A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON HEALING DISCOURAGEMENT

By Susan Mack

IF YOU'VE EVER been praying for healing and felt discouraged with your progress, perhaps you've thought, as I have, that time was at the root of your discouragement. Maybe you started your prayers with expectation and hope, and felt that as long as there was some measure of progress, some sign that things were getting better, it was easy to persist in turning to God for a solution. But if things dragged on and you felt stuck, or perhaps if much time had passed and the situation appeared to be getting worse, discouragement grew increasingly overwhelming.

At one point, I prayed over a year for the healing of a painful internal condition. During this time, I had pondered many aspects of the nature of God and myself as His spiritual idea, or image. And I had started to identify myself more as a spiritual being and to drop the view of myself as a limited mortal. But I still wasn't seeing healing.

One day, when I was feeling particularly down, I found myself asking: "What would it be like, if I could get past the time factor?" I'd read statements by physicists that said time is not absolute, but a relative measurement, something ultimately subject to our viewpoint. And I thought about what Mary Baker Eddy said in Science and Health: "Life is without beginning and without end. Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity. One ceases in proportion as the other is recognized. Time is finite; eternity is forever infinite" (pp. 468, 469).