TeenConnect: UpFront
November 3, 2016
‘How can I have a healing?’
Maybe you know the feeling. You’re sitting in Sunday School, or at camp, or at a Wednesday evening testimony meeting, and one of your peers shares a healing. Something balls up inside you. I’ve never had a healing like that, you think.
In talking with teens around the U.S. about sharing their experiences on TeenConnect, as well as in the print Christian Science Sentinel and The Christian Science Journal, I’ve encountered this comment more than you might think. Or maybe this doesn’t come as a surprise, because as I said, you know the feeling you get when someone shares a spectacular insight or experience.
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It’s gotten me thinking about a couple of important questions. First: What does a healing look like? And second: How can each of us experience healing?
Healing is about giving up our view of a situation for God’s view.
Simply put, healing is a change in thought. It’s a shift from a limited perspective that’s boxed in by pain, stress, injustice, or fear, to one that sees, accepts, and understands more about God’s goodness and power as the truth of what’s going on. It’s movement away from a feeling that love and comfort are absent to a conviction that divine Love, being ever present, must be with us, and with everyone, all the time. Healing is about giving up our view of a situation for God’s view.
In other words, healing isn’t just a broken leg no longer being broken or a cold that vanishes in a matter of minutes. Healings are also those moments of being willing to hear God’s voice when you’re angry—and then yielding to forgiveness. They’re moments when you counter the crush of stress with the trust that you’re not in this alone, because you actually reflect the infinite, all-knowing Mind. Healing is even a simple, God-motivated letting go—letting go of misperceptions about yourself or others, which would cause you to see a child of God as, well, something other than the child of God.
So how can each of us experience healing? Again, it’s simpler than you might think: Be willing to see things differently. For me at least, willingness seems to be the “special sauce” in healing, moving me from a mental place where it seems that something painful or upsetting is going on to the recognition that reality is in God, divine Love.
That’s the thing about healing. We can all count on it.
Willingness is the “special sauce” because it’s what turns me to God in spite of what the five physical senses are telling me, in spite of the anger I think I want to hang on to, in spite of the hurt that feels so legitimate or insurmountable. The willingness to know God, Truth, is powerful. Sometimes, when things are hard, that’s the only place I feel like I can start praying. I’ll say something like, “God, I want to know what You’re saying to me. I want to know what’s really going on—what the spiritual reality is. Help me.”
Healing doesn’t always happen easily or quickly (though sometimes it does!), but it does happen inevitably. That’s the thing about healing. We can all count on it, because it’s just a bringing to light of what’s already there: Perfect God and perfect man, including you.
So how can you have a healing? Be willing to be changed—in the way you think. Trust the power and presence of good more than you believe the appearance of evil. Feel God’s love removing the little concerns in your day as well as the big challenges.
And then write and tell us about it. We’re all blessed by reading your healings—big or small—because they’re proof that the laws of God are in operation and include everyone.