At lunch one day about a year ago, I suddenly sneezed. By dinnertime I had a very stuffy nose. I knew it was time to pray, but I felt uninspired and thought praying for healing would be hard.

Then I remembered a time several years earlier when I was similarly unwell for a couple of days and could not seem to pray. On that occasion, I hadn’t felt that God was present or real. I called a Christian Science practitioner for treatment through prayer, and when I mentioned the lack of inspiration, he surprised me by saying, “That’s not your thought.” 

It had never occurred to me that the sense of God being far away was simply an imposition on my consciousness rather than my own thinking—and wasn’t actually true. The practitioner’s comment opened me up to a new way of thinking, and I was quickly healed after that conversation. Since then, whenever I have felt unwell and uninspired, I have gone back to that idea. I have found that it’s often not symptoms of sickness that need to be addressed but rather the feeling that God’s love isn’t there for me. Reconnecting with that love has often been exactly what was needed to restore my health.