Bright ideas

A few years ago, I had a healing that deepened my understanding of God’s creation and my place in this creation.

I had observed many warts growing on my hands but wasn’t aware of what they were or that I could pray to find healing. When I showed them to my parents, we talked, and they let me know I had the option of handling the situation through medicine or prayer, but that it wouldn’t be right to ignore the problem. I decided I would choose prayer because it had been effective for me before. 

I started praying by thinking about God’s entire creation. I struggled with the question of why God would create a wart, something ugly and so unlike the good His creation is supposed to be. Did He actually create something ugly? The answer came in an epiphany that, like in so many other healings, reintroduced an idea I already knew, but in a fresh way. 

I remembered a healing of altitude sickness I’d had the year before. The healing had occurred at a camp for Christian Scientists located in the heart of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. I was feeling dizzy as our group was ascending a massive 14,000-foot peak. In praying then, I’d looked at the vast forest, mountains, and clouds surrounding me. A statement came to me from the first chapter of Genesis: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (verse 31). That was the key! God made everything and He made it all good. He made me and my fellow campers. He made nature and man to live in peace, not harm one another. He would never create two things to war with each other. Therefore, the battle with the altitude wasn’t from God. God’s universe is united and whole, not divided and battling. Soon the dizziness subsided and I felt energized and ready to continue hiking.  

These bright ideas of Truth were angel messages from God.

I thought about this past healing as I began to pray about the warts. And I began to see that God hadn’t created the warts at all. I turned to the weekly Christian Science Bible Lesson for inspiration and found some ideas about God and good. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, states on page 286 of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “In the Saxon and twenty other tongues good is the term for God. The Scriptures declare all that He made to be good, like Himself,—good in Principle and in idea. Therefore the spiritual universe is good, and reflects God as He is.” God’s goodness runs so deep, and includes those of all cultures and nations. God, good, could never create illnesses or physical defects, like altitude sickness or warts, to harm the good in His universe. These bright ideas of Truth were angel messages from God, and I received many more. 

I continued to pray with the idea of freedom from limitation and physical deformity. Hymn 412 provided some inspiration:

I thought of myself as the dreamer or captive in the hymn. I’ve had many experiences of waking up from bad dreams and discovering their nothingness. This freedom from the nothingness of dreams was totally relatable. I just had to “wake up” from the dream that there were warts covering my fingers and be awake to the presence of God’s goodness, awake to healing. These warts had no identity and were definitely not mine. They were not part of God’s creation either. 

Once I recognized and accepted these truths, the warts began to painlessly disappear. Within two weeks, the healing was complete. No remnants of scarring existed on my hands. It was as if the warts had never been there. They haven’t reappeared.

I am grateful for God’s healing goodness and the united and free nature of His kingdom.