Beyond keeping score

It looked as though it was going to be a long night for my favorite pro football team. They were losing 0–24 at half-time, and clearly not playing well.

I tried to imagine what their coach could say in the locker room at the half-time break that would reverse their foundering fortunes. Could they regroup quickly enough to save their reputation?

Then it occurred to me to ask what I would say if I were a Christian Science practitioner confronted with a similar disheartening situation—a patient struggling with an unyielding disease, perhaps.

Too often when faced with a demoralizing outlook, people are inclined to give up and agree to quietly suffer the rest of their days or just consent to die.

When “my” team reemerged from the locker room, they were a different squad, and showed a complete turnaround. They were no longer consenting to lose. Instead of being humiliated by the scoreboard and becoming its prisoner, their attention was fixed on the goal line—getting the ball across the line as frequently as necessary to pull ahead and win, which they eventually did in a nail-biting overtime surge.  

It occurred to me that one of the concepts the coach might have tried to convey was that nothing behind you matters. A Christian Science healer speaking to a disheartened patient might frame the call for spiritual healing in a similar voice, perhaps adding this spiritual perspective: Not only does nothing behind you matter, but in truth, nothing about matter, matters.

The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, once wrote: “In Science, you can have no power opposed to God, and the physical senses must give up their false testimony. Your influence for good depends upon the weight you throw into the right scale” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 192 ).

In the football game it was obvious that at the half-time break the losing coach and his players had reevaluated their prospects. Just so, the Christian Science healer doesn’t form conclusions based on measurements taken at any intermediate stage. The false boast of an unyielding chronic belief, with its threats of incurability or discouragement, doesn’t impact the certain outcome of the activity of the healing Christ.

In truth, nothing about matter, matters.

The healer strives to lift a patient’s thought above and beyond any scoreboard because that is not a reliable forecast of outcomes. Rather, the healer expects a perfect outcome because healing is mandated by inviolable spiritual truths that never leave the outcome in doubt.

Mrs. Eddy writes: “Since God is All, there is no room for His unlikeness. God, Spirit, alone created all, and called it good” (Science and Health, p. 339 ). That translates into an absolute expectancy of good and healing, and nothing less.

Disgruntled or ailing mortals sometimes set their own preconditions for healing instead of just yielding to God and His Christ. In his healing ministry, Christ Jesus encountered such a situation just before he healed an invalid at the pool of Bethesda, next to the old sheep market in the northeast corner of the city of Jerusalem.

The Gospel of John tells us that this crippled man had been infirm for 38 years. So no wonder he was eager to do all he could to get his healing, and he briefed Jesus on the scope of the problem to be met. But he had so fortified himself with preconditions and excuses that he left little margin for expectancy of healing.

Jesus merely asked him, “Wilt thou be made whole?” (5:6 ). The invalid responded by explaining the reasons for his discouragement: an angel first had to be present to bring about the healing; the angel had to stir the waters to activate the healing power; the man needed someone to help him into the pool; and he had to beat others into the water to get the healing.

Operating under a different set of rules—entirely spiritual—Jesus didn’t need to be briefed about matter’s preconditions for healing. He discounted the man’s terms for wellness, and simply said, “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk” (verse 8 ). Jesus knew that God, the one divine Mind, was the only healer. And Christian healers today follow Jesus’ example, knowing that there are no hopeless conditions, any more than the half-time score in a game might determine the final outcome.

We also know that matter can dictate no insurmountable conditions. Following in the steps of Jesus’ ministry we know that neither the healer nor the patient is ever alone; never without the support of God, the divine Principle of all that is real.

In a prison cell in Rome, the Apostle Paul understood man’s inseparability from God when he wrote that “it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13 ). With such conviction, we need never lose hope, regardless of what the scoreboard is currently telling us.