The best Christmas gift ever
“What are you doing down here?”
Christabel, my 6th grade daughter, sounded surprised. Just 15 minutes earlier, I had told her I hadn’t been feeling well and was going upstairs to go to bed, even though it was still very early.
“I’m feeling better,” I answered.
“How come?”
“That idea you shared with me really helped. A lot!”
“Seriously?!”
“Yes. It really did. You healed me. Thank you.”
“Wow. Cool!”
The idea that she could heal someone else through her understanding of God was a little startling to Christabel. Although she’s had many healings through prayer, she wrestles with lots of questions about God. And she doesn’t yet tend to think of herself as the “practitioner or healer type.” But on this particular day, she had just returned home from two weeks at a summer camp for Christian Scientists. Lots of things had come up that she’d prayed about and it had made a difference. In fact, just a few nights before, while still at camp, she’d had a nice healing and had really felt God was with her.
So when I told her I wasn’t feeling well and had a bad headache, Christabel said: “Think about how big the whole earth is. And God is like a billion, billion times bigger than that. And this infinitely huge God is Love, and all that amount of Love is loving you. Then think about the size of your head.” She held up her hands, measuring in the air, the size of my head. The look on her face told me I’d be pretty silly to think a temporary pain in my head could compare to the ever-real love of God for me.
I couldn’t help thinking about the truth of what Christabel had said. Realizing how much larger God was than any pain was pretty easy to do. But the thought that really began to bring a change was that all of that infinite Love was loving me. Was I willing to accept it? Would I let myself believe it, even though I wasn’t feeling well? It was all very simple. The more I prayed about it, the more real it felt. And then I suddenly realized I was feeling like myself again.
I think we both learned some important things about healing that day. First, we learned that we should expect healing to be a natural part of our relationship with God. Why should we be surprised by healing when we pray? We are not surprised the light comes on when we flip a light switch.
Second, we learned that we don’t have to feel like we’re supposed to be holy enough to walk on water before we’re ready for healing. Healing doesn’t happen because of how humanly perfect we are. It happens because of how perfect and holy God is. Yes, we want to think and act the right way, but that is mainly to help us be able to notice and believe what God is doing.
When you pray, you can expect to receive the gift of healing.
Third, we learned that we’re never as far away from healing as sickness or a problem would have us think we are. Christian Science teaches us that God is infinite, all-powerful good. Everything and everyone God created must also be good, since God made them. My job wasn’t to try to turn bad-feeling matter into good-feeling matter. My job was to understand that I was spiritual and that God’s love for me was real. Listening to these good thoughts, and realizing they have power in our lives, that is having the Christ with us.
Christmas is the time of year when people often think a lot about the Christ, and especially about the Bible story of Jesus’ birth. Remember, that story all started when the angel Gabriel visited Mary and told her that she would have a baby and he would be the Messiah, the Savior of the world. One of the amazing things about Mary is that she never thought to herself: “Wow, I’ve got to make a Savior. I hope I’m good enough to do that!” Instead, she realized that her main job was just to believe and accept what the angel had told her. What if she had said to the angel: “I don’t believe you. That’s ridiculous!” But she didn’t do that. She believed the angel and said, “May it happen to me just as you said it would” (Luke 1:38, New International Reader’s Version).
Of course, Mary still had a lot to do. She had to work hard at taking care of Jesus and making sure he was fed, clothed, and taught well as he grew up. But most of all, she just needed to love and cherish what God had made Jesus to be. And that’s really what we need to do when it comes to our role in healing. We don’t do the healing. But we do have to work at seeing the good that God is doing. We need to accept and cherish the fact that God does heal us. That’s why Mary Baker Eddy says that Christian healing “is the babe we are to cherish” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 370).
So as you and I think about the message of Christmas this year, let’s not just think of the appearing of the baby Jesus, over 2,000 years ago in a far-away manger. Maybe we can think more of cherishing healing as something we expect to see appearing right now, right here. That’s how we know Christ is with us today. We can believe and accept the Christ. And we can trust that, when we pray, God answers through healing. That is the best Christmas present ever!
When my dad told me he wasn’t feeling well, at first I didn’t really think much of it. Then I thought, what would I have done at my Christian Science camp? The answer was, I would’ve prayed. I remembered how one of our camp practitioners had told us something along the lines of this: “God is huge. God is bigger than our camp lodge, bigger than camp, bigger than the whole state of Missouri (the camp’s location)! God is bigger than the country, the world. God is bigger than the farthest star from us plus a billion miles more. God is everywhere and God is infinite.”
I thought that if God was bigger than anything, He was certainly bigger than my dad’s headache and could easily overpower it. Couldn’t a lion overpower a mouse? Yes. I told my dad this, and he really took it to heart. A while later, my dad told me he was completely healed.
I was surprised that an 11-year-old, let alone me, was able to heal a full-grown Christian Science practitioner like my dad! It was a surprising night for both of us.
—Christabel
