The image of harvest time is often used as a metaphor for a season of plenty, abundant blessings, baskets overflowing with the fruits of one's good work. Yet there may be periods in one's life when it doesn't seem as if there is much to be grateful for. These times might even feel like extended droughts or like cold, hard winters. The harvest of any good may seem either impossible to accomplish or relegated to a season long past or a season long in coming.

Christ Jesus turned his followers in another direction. He recognized that one's vision of reality is what makes all the difference. It is never that there isn't good to be gathered but rather that people sometimes tend to look for it in the wrong places or else not look for it at all. Vision that turns inward, looking solely on the so-called mortal condition, or downward where perceptions are closed in and confined by materiality, cannot see what is truly going on. And what is truly going on is the eternal unfolding of unlimited good, which expresses the law of divine reality—the law of God's kingdom at hand.

This good is infinite spiritual substance; it includes present peace, ever-abiding joy, invariable love. And this unfolding good, which is really God's own nature being continuously revealed throughout His creation, is not restricted by dry seasons of the heart or bitter winters of the human spirit. But to know—really know—this spiritual good and to accept its blessing on our lives we must be willing to heed the transforming influence of Christ, Truth, in our consciousness and lift up our vision of reality. As Jesus declared, "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest." ^{John 4:35.}

If we're in need of healing, our vision of reality can be lifted up and the harvest of spiritual truth can be reaped even now. Our deep prayer and our study of the Bible and of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, help us to bring in this gracious harvest. We learn that man is so much more than a downtrodden mortal. In truth each of us is God's radiant spiritual expression, the child of His love, the reflection of His perfect goodness.

The idea of God, who is pure Spirit and illimitable Mind, can't be fragmented or sickly or malfunctioning. Man, as spiritual idea, is whole, complete, free; he moves and has his being in perfect harmony with the perfect will of God. Spiritual reflection is not encumbered by physicality; not malformed by genetic deficiency; not victimized by contagion; not bound by fear; not captured by sin. Spiritual reflection is God's image and likeness. It is our own true nature. Spiritual reflection can manifest only what its source is. And as God—divine Principle, eternal Life— is the one source of all being, man expresses health, holiness, purity, vigor, strength, and dominion.

But do such spiritual truths seem startling? What the world presents to us often seems so contrary to this noble view of man. Yet, as Jesus demonstrated conclusively in healing all manner of disease and in raising the dead, it is this "noble" view—this spiritual fact—of what man actually is that represents the redeeming action of God's Christ. Through prayer we find Christ, Truth, transforming our thinking, lifting our vision; and what may have seemed hidden to the corporeal senses is revealed as the glorious reality—even though it may be nothing like what we saw before, with our eyes looking only into the dust of human misconceptions. With transformation of thought, healing comes.

In one of her writings, titled Unity of Good, Mrs. Eddy speaks of Jesus' healing work and the regeneration of thought needed for those who would be healed. She observes of the Master: "He demanded a change of consciousness and evidence, and effected this change through the higher laws of God. The palsied hand moved, despite the boastful sense of physical law and order. Jesus stooped not to human consciousness, nor to the evidence of the senses. He heeded not the taunt, 'That withered hand looks very real and feels very real;' but he cut off this vain boasting and destroyed human pride by taking away the material evidence."

In the same paragraph Mrs. Eddy points specifically to Jesus' words in the New Testament that the harvest time is not far off in the distance but that the fields are ready at this moment for the reaping. She writes, "Jesus required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for perfection and its possibilities." ^{Un., p. 11.}

Not "cycles of time nor thought" but transformation of thought, "a change of consciousness," a lifting up of our vision of reality—this is the spiritual means by which we bring in healing's harvest. Look up, and what do you see? The fields are full. God's bounty is yours. The time for healing is now.

WILLIAM E. MOODY