I refused to put pain in my backpack
Originally appeared on spirituality.com
While hiking with my husband on a primitive trail in Arches National Park, Utah, I climbed a section of steep rock to bypass a deep puddle on the path. Halfway up, I began to slip and had to quickly twist my back into the rock to stop sliding. When I made it to the top, I was so elated that I forgot about the incident and hiked to the trail’s end.
The next morning, my neck and shoulders were sore and stiff. I was puzzled—until I remembered the climb up the slick rock.
I turn to God whenever I face a challenge, and find His help to be sufficient in every circumstance. So I realized that the quickest way to find freedom from the intense pain would be to focus on what was going on spiritually.
As I dug into prayer, this sentence from Science and Health popped into my head: “Muscles are not self-acting.” If they’re not self-acting, I thought, then what controls their action? It must be the source of all action—God. If God, Mind, controls muscle, a solution was at hand.
We’d planned an afternoon hike, but given the struggle to turn my head and neck, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to go. As I prayed, I realized I had to choose what was going to govern my decision: fear? Or my conviction that spiritual healing, as Jesus taught it, is possible to everyone today?
This wasn’t some mental exercise—mind over matter—but my choice to recognize that I could trust in God’s care for me.
I could say no to the fear and pain, because pain has no place in spiritual man—meaning all men, women, and children. The Bible states, “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Pain isn’t good, so it couldn’t have been created by God. And because God is the source of all that is real, whatever is unlike spiritual reality can have no power over us.
I clung to the knowledge of who I really am as God’s spiritual child. God’s idea is not stuck in a limited, material body, but is perfect and free. An idea isn’t material at all.
I thought about the words to a hymn:
I walk with Love along the way,
And O, it is a holy day;
No more I suffer cruel fear,
I feel God's presence with me here;
The joy that none can take away
Is mine; I walk with Love today.
(Minnie M. H. Ayers, Christian Science Hymnal, No. 139
)
And then we set out on the hike. It was a beautiful day, and I found it fairly easy to hike the mile up to the top of the canyon rim.
The next morning, my husband and I went to Bryce Canyon, Utah, to set out on what the National Park rangers label a strenuous hike. The pain had lessened and it seemed right to continue our trip.
The sun was hiding under a cloud as we began our five-mile trek, but my heart was filled with sunshine and gratitude for my identity as a child of God. I was carrying a fairly heavy backpack on my shoulder, but instead of tolerating the remaining physical discomfort, I let go of any caution. I felt a sense of peace and the gentle presence of Love.
I remembered an account of Jesus healing a blind man. The full healing didn’t take place immediately. The Bible records that Jesus “took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.”
I then realized that there is no partial healing. Simple improvement wasn’t enough to meet God’s standard. God’s rule allows no room for pain at all.
As I continued to pray and “walk with Love” along the dusty canyon path, I realized that all the pain was gone. I finished the hike with joy!
Hiking with Love:
Science and Health
199:8 (only)
King James Bible
Gen 1:31 God (to .)
Mark 8:23-25