Healing after a Covid exposure
It was finals week, and I was stressed. But things felt even more stressful when my roommate told me she’d tested positive for Covid. I was scared. I was also worried that I wouldn’t be able to go home for Christmas break or see my friends. I wasn’t sure what to do, but my friends really wanted me to get tested, since I’d been around them.
While I wanted to be considerate and wise, I knew that listening to my friends’ fears wasn’t a good way to quiet my own fears, so I decided to go back to my dorm room and be alone for a little bit. In the Bible, Jesus says that to pray effectively, we should, “enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly” (Matthew 6:6). By returning to my dorm room alone, I felt I was symbolically closing the door on my friends’ concerns so I could focus on what God was telling me.
It felt natural for me to rely on prayer at a moment like this because praying has helped me and brought me a lot of peace when I’ve felt scared in the past. I called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me and, looking for some inspiration, began to read a few articles published in the Christian Science Sentinel. This passage in particular stuck out to me: “. . . our true identity is not in bodily characteristics, but in the reflection of infinitely good spiritual qualities, such as intelligence, kindness, and generosity” (Ryan Vigil, “Identity—what am I seeing?” January 3, 2022). I thought a lot about this idea, and I was able to start to see myself as the expression of God’s good qualities. Qualities can’t be vulnerable to disease, because they’re spiritual. So I could see that my spiritual identity couldn’t be attacked or affected.
Enjoy 1 free Sentinel article or audio program each month, including content from 1898 to today.
