'Heaven all the way to heaven'

I love the biblical assurance, “For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven” (Psalms 119:89 ). It says to me that the truth of my identity is permanently fixed, resting in a secret place—in the unchanging calm and the freedom and harmony called heaven, forever.

What a joyous discovery it is to find this assurance repeated over and over in the Bible in different words! Consider the Lord’s Prayer, which begins, “Our Father which art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9 ). If our Father is there, we must be settled there also. And how precious it is to be reminded that divine Love “maketh me to lie down in green pastures” (Psalms 23:2 )—in other words, God settles us in heaven.

When our family first heard of Christian Science, we were desperate. We had recently moved far away from home, several children were down with the flu, and one was in the hospital. A friend told us about Christian Science and about practitioners who pray for you. With our consent, she arranged for a friend of hers who was a practitioner to call on us. 

I will never forget that visit. Something the practitioner said especially stood out in my mind: “It can be heaven all the way to heaven.” Those were his exact words. My husband remarked after the practitioner left that either he was a very good salesman or he had something we didn’t have. But whatever it was, we wanted it. The children quickly recovered from the flu, and our daughter was released from the hospital completely healed of the apparently incurable allergy from which she’d been suffering. My husband and I left that meeting with the practitioner with a new sense of peace and well-being.

We enrolled all six of our children in Sunday School and started attending church as well as studying the Christian Science Bible Lesson each day. From that time on we were on an upward journey. My husband and I joined a branch church and eventually had Primary class instruction in Christian Science. We learned that what that practitioner had that was so special was an understanding of God and his relationship to Him. 

We had all the ups and downs that a family has in raising children, but we now had something substantial to turn to for help. Early healings for our family included whooping cough cured, an ulcerated leg healed, teeth straightened. No wonder we were impressed.

The journey continues today to understand God, to love more, to listen for fresh ideas, to heal and be healed. I love this definition of heal that I found in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: “… to make harmony the reality and discord the unreality” (p. 352 ). It doesn’t say anything about changing matter, which so often is our attempt.

I love this Bible verse: “When my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Psalms 61:2 ). How often I flee to that secret place, where I am so naturally held in the arms of comforting love, in harmony and freedom. My heart is overwhelmed with gratitude to catch a glimpse that the way to have “heaven all the way to heaven” is to see we have been there all along and will stay there forever: settled, adjusted, governed, loved, and harmonized by divine Principle.