Are we looking for healing in Christian Science? If we are, we need to feel God's boundless love for us. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" Mary Baker Eddy says (pp. 365, 366), "The poor suffering heart needs its rightful nutriment, such as peace, patience in tribulation, and a priceless sense of the dear Father's loving-kindness."

Nutriment is something a person takes to nourish himself. So this "sense of the dear Father's loving-kindness" that we need is a spiritual sense of God's love which we take in mentally to nourish ourselves. Mrs. Eddy calls it "a priceless sense."

One reason a sense of God's love for us is "priceless" is that it helps us to expect healing, and to expect healing is as important as it is for a baseball player to expect to receive a ball that is being thrown to him. God continually bestows health on us as His children. Let us expect healing.

There is no better way for us to expect healing than to feel that God loves us. We often expect favors and kindnesses from those who love us, and we expect most from those who love us most. So we expect healing from God to the degree that we feel His boundless love for us.

Our feeling should not be mere emotional ecstasy or blind faith. As much as possible we must enlighten and strengthen our confidence that God loves us by understanding the spiritual reasons why He loves us, the spiritual facts of God as ever-present Love and of man's relationship to Him as taught in Christian Science. To the degree that we have the spiritual understanding of man's inseparability from God as idea, we shall not only expect healing, but we shall have healing. Mrs. Eddy tells us (ibid., p. 203), "If God were understood instead of being merely believed, this understanding would establish health."

The following experience illustrates the helpfulness of expecting healing. A man had broken the bones in all four fingers of one hand, and a doctor had placed the hand and forearm in a cast. Previous to his accident, the man had not known anything of Christian Science. A few days after the accident he asked a Christian Scientist to explain the healing benefits and some of the simpler truths of this Science to him. After he had listened a while, he said: "I understand what you're telling me, but I don't deserve a healing. God wouldn't want to heal me; I haven't lived a good enough life." The man did not expect healing because he did not feel God's love.

So the Scientist said that God is Love and that He would forgive the man's mistakes if he really was sorry for them and through with them; that God knew him as His own perfect child; and that God felt nothing but great love for him. All this time, of course, the Scientist was silently understanding the truth of the situation: that real selfhood is always the spiritual, perfect expression of God and that God loves His creation eternally.

The Scientist told the man of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son; and then he added, "God is welcoming you as the father welcomed the son in the story, just as if you never had done anything wrong and as if you never had been away from God."

The man was deeply moved. Tears of joy filled his eyes as he felt the Scientist's compassion and heard about God's great love for man. "God loves me that much?" he asked. But his happy expression showed that he already believed it. Immediately the tips of the fingers of his injured hand started to twitch, indicating a changed condition of the hand. An X ray taken by the doctor that same day showed that all of the broken bones were completely knitted, just as if they had been healing for several weeks instead of for only a few days.

A short time after this the man came to the Scientist for healing of a disease called trench mouth, which his dentist had said was incurable. It too was quickly and completely healed through the Scientist's prayers. The dentist was unable to explain the healing. The healed one knew, however, that it was another proof of how dearly God loved him.

God loves us all. He clothes us with joy, peace, and the beauty of holiness, as the expression of sinless Soul. Even if physical sense shows a different picture of us, physical sense is always a liar. Its history is no more real than a dream that is past. Only spiritual sense testifies to what we really are: God's completely lovable and completely loved expression of Himself. Let us insist on this fact. The more we spiritually understand it, the more our sense of God's love for us will grow; and the more our understanding grows, the more we shall expect healing, and the closer we shall be to the healing itself.

Christ Jesus stressed the importance of trusting God and expecting healing. He called it faith. To the woman whom he healed of a twelve-year issue of blood he said (Matt. 9:22), "Thy faith hath made thee whole." To the two blind men who had replied affirmatively to his question (Matt. 9:28), "Believe ye that I am able to do this?" Jesus said, "According to your faith be it unto you." They had shown an expectancy of healing, and, together with Jesus' great spiritual understanding, their confidence and expectancy were enough to bring healing. In contrast with this, the people in the land of Jesus' childhood questioned his God-given power to heal. And the Bible says (Matt. 13:58), "He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief." They did not expect healing.

Do we expect healing? We can find it. Jesus said (Luke 11:9), "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." Expectancy, though, is important; for do we knock at a door if we do not expect it to be opened? And if we truly expect, do we knock just once or twice, or do we persist in knocking? Likewise we knock effectively at the door of spiritual healing only if we knock with persistent expectancy.

Our expectancy will be effective in the degree that we support it with spiritual reasons why we should expect healing. We can find many reasons. But a most important reason for expecting healing is to be found in the fact that God loves us infinitely and eternally as His own lovable ideas.