‘Just sleep’ moment replaced with prayer

Lorie Gratis Harris

One Sunday, after attending my branch Church of Christ, Scientist, and running a few errands, I came home feeling awful, struggling with flu-like symptoms. I put on my pajamas, snuggled up with a blanket in a chair, and wrestled with a very strong desire to just sleep.

The week before, the subject of the Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly had been “God the Only Cause and Creator.” The very first citation from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy had been “Everything in God’s universe expresses Him” (p. 331), and it had jumped out at me in a way it never had before. The word everything particularly leaped off the page, becoming the basis for much of my prayerful work during that week. If what I was experiencing was not expressing God, I would immediately affirm its unreality in God’s universe—the only real universe.

Monitoring our thoughts with this kind of vigilance is easier said than done, but I found it easier to do than usual that week, partly owing to digging deeper into the Bible Lesson and understanding more of our ability to shut out sick or sinful thoughts from our consciousness, something that we are able to do through consecrated prayer.

So when I found myself wrestling with flu-like symptoms, I thought about how I had been witnessing the truth of Mrs. Eddy’s statement the entire week before—that everything in God’s universe expresses Him. I shut the door of my thought on the suggestion of sickness and paid attention to what I was letting in. The unpleasant symptoms were obviously not from God, so I kicked out the thought that they could be part of my true identity or consciousness. I saw more clearly that I am part of God’s universe and therefore the expression of Him.

Within an hour, I hopped up off my chair, perfectly well. Shedding my blanket and changing out of my pajamas, I went on to work around the house for another several hours. And in the two days following this experience, I put in a 12- and a 16-hour day at work—with more energy and ease than usual!

It seems sometimes that when our alertness and prayerful work is needed the most, that’s when we are either literally or figuratively tempted to fall asleep—like Jesus’ disciples in the garden of Gethsemane. But there are great rewards when we persist in staying with Truth, God, rather than giving in to error. We see that Truth is the only reality, and this brings healing.

Lorie Gratis Harris
West Chester, Pennsylvania, US

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