Article April 9, 2007 Issue

humbled, exalted, and healed

BY CHARLES FERRIS

IT WAS AFTER midnight. I was in the middle of a writing project and it was not going well. There was a deadline, and I was feeling stuck. I even felt that maybe I had the wrong subject. Then to top it off, a peculiar, painful condition developed in my jaw. I thought, "Oh, no. I don't need any additional problems to hinder the progress of this writing assignment."

Because it was late, I didn't want to call someone and ask for help through prayer. Instead, I determined to be as spiritually minded as I could and yield humbly to God's care. I finished up some other needful work and went to bed, still in some discomfort.

During the night, I kept praying, and in the morning I experienced to a degree what Mary Baker Eddy described as "one moment of divine consciousness" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 598). I felt the allness of God in that divine moment in which there is no physical time, only the awareness that He is present and that His creation is spiritually perfect and complete. I knew I was that creation—my identity was the compound of all the divine Mind's ideas right then. These ideas included no pain, no physical difficulty, in fact, no physicality of any kind.