This past summer I was preparing to travel abroad, and the night before my flight I was checking our delivery box on our driveway when I felt something brushing against my ankles. It was totally dark in the heavily wooded area in which we live, so I used my phone to illuminate the ground and saw that I was standing in a large expanse of poison ivy. I was in sandals, and my first thought was disappointment. I had a busy trip coming up, with a lot of activity and no time for an annoying condition such as a rash from poison ivy.

As I headed back to the house, I felt reassured by the thought, “It only touched your ankles a little bit. That can’t be too bad.” Although this reasoning wasn’t based on spiritual understanding and was therefore unreliable, it went unrecognized as such and remained uncorrected in my thought. 

I rinsed off, went to bed, and forgot about it … until two days later, after arriving in Europe, when I wondered why I was scratching my ankles so much. It was then that I noticed the rash all over them. 

My response this time was “No!” Not “No, I don’t have time for this” or “No, I barely touched poison ivy,” but “No” as a rejection of something completely unlike God. In that moment the thought came: “You can’t believe in a dangerous plant any more than you can believe in a talking serpent!” I recognized this as an angel message from God because it brought instant peace and relief to my thought. I couldn’t believe in something so preposterous! God has only one creation, which is entirely good, and this creation is a revelation, not material but spiritual. There can be no harmful element in this all-good creation. All evidence of poison ivy was totally gone by the next day.

The Bible says, “(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (II Corinthians 10:4, 5). 

This healing was a lesson to me about how vital it is to continually and alertly examine and correct wrong thoughts. Not with material logic—that was part of the “imagination” that needed to be cast down—but rather by letting the correction come from God’s wisdom. In the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes: “All substance, intelligence, wisdom, being, immortality, cause, and effect belong to God. These are His attributes, the eternal manifestations of the infinite divine Principle, Love. No wisdom is wise but His wisdom; …” (p. 275).

I’m so grateful for this practical proof of God’s care. The spiritual lesson I gained continues to unfold new spiritual views that benefit my practice of Christian Science.

Christine Whitney
Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, US