Flu symptoms gone
Several months ago, I came down with the flu. I called my Christian Science teacher to help me through prayer and asked her why I felt the disease was so real. She said that rather than listening to mortal mind, I could know that in actuality I am one with divine Mind. I recovered quickly.
However, only a few weeks later, I again came down with the same symptoms—and this time they were much more serious. As I prayed, I looked up the words suffering and suffer in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. One citation that I found came from the chapter titled “Physiology.” It reads: “Mortal mind alone suffers,—not because a law of matter has been transgressed, but because a law of this so-called mind has been disobeyed” (p. 184 ). To me, this confirmed what my teacher had said the first time I called for help, and now—by turning more wholeheartedly from the physical complaint to spiritual truths—I could understand what she meant even more clearly. Nevertheless, the symptoms lingered.
I called my teacher again, and she asked me if I needed to forgive anyone. She had already helped me a year ago with an inharmonious situation involving my being dismissed from my job. I told her I was sure I had forgiven everyone, and she reminded me that it is God’s will, not mine, which is done (see Luke 22:42 ). She had often said that it is God who sees the entire picture—so I knew I had to begin to trust God by doing His will, and that this will certainly included forgiveness. After all, to feel harmed by others is to miss the understanding that we cannot lose anything God supplies.
The practitioner said she would pray for me. I understood that I had to leave everything to “God’s disposal of events” (Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 281 ).
That night, still in great discomfort, I asked God, fervently and wholeheartedly, what I needed to know. Like a loud voice, I heard: “Don’t believe what you are feeling and experiencing. That’s not the truth. What is spiritual is the Truth.” I then realized that disease is in thought only, and for that reason, no disease is any more real than another. With this recognition, the mesmeric hold of the suffering was gone—and everyone who had been involved with what I saw as injustice regarding the dismissal from my job was instantly forgiven. Like a balloon being pricked, the hurt feelings that were related to my job situation burst. And with that any lingering resentment as well as the flu symptoms were gone.
Later, I came across an article in the February 20, 1989, issue of the Sentinel, titled “Forgiveness, a scientific defense,” by Robert Nguyen Cramer. Everything in that article was true for me, and I rejoiced in finding it at a time when I was helping someone else overcome a sense of victimization. So prevalent are the claims of injustice and victimization in the world
—but Christian Science is available for anyone to understand and practice. A scientific defense enables us to rise above all sense of helplessness in these circumstances and prove that there is one Mind, one God, one creation. That way, we understand that nothing—no mortal mind with its threats of injustice—can trick us into the belief of hate, revenge, or sickness as any part of reality.
Jacquelyn Reid
Tujunga, California, US
