Only fourteen more days and we would leave on a long-planned vacation with our two nursery-schoolers. We'd walk beaches, explore islands, swim in warm water. But even as I was considering our trip, the children catapulted through the door, each waving a typed piece of paper—a note from their schoolteacher. It read, "Your child has been exposed to...." It named a so-called children's disease. "Please examine him carefully before sending him to nursery school each morning. The incubation period is fourteen days."

Fourteen days. Why now? I thought. I wish the school had never sent the note. I wish I didn't know. I wish .... But I caught myself. I could do better thinking than that. Here and now I had an opportunity to prove that Christian Science works to prevent as well as heal disease. So I stopped the wishful thinking and got to work, refuting the suggestions of disease that would frighten me.

"Your child ...." the note said. No, I reasoned, they are God's children, and no possessive, personal sense of parenthood can make me fear for their well-being, since they are the children of His care. Paul told the Athenians, "In him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring." ^{Acts 17:28;}

"Exposed ...," the note continued. Yes, I thought, but only to the radiant good that comes from divine Love. But what about that ominous name of the disease? Not a cause for fear, but a powerless belief in something besides omnipotent God, good. Certainly a loving Father-Mother would never establish a law that under certain circumstances His children had to be miserable for a prescribed number of days. Impossible!

"Please examine him carefully ....." Examining the children's bodies was the last thing I wanted to do. I knew that type of examination could tell me nothing about the real man, God's reflection. But somewhere, I recalled, Mrs. Eddy uses the word "examine" in a positive way: "We should examine ourselves and learn what is the affection and purpose of the heart, for in this way only can we learn what we honestly are." ^{Science and Health, p. 8;} I realized my own thought had to be examined to see what my concept of children was. Surely, I affirmed, they are the loved of Love, not subject to false health laws but governed by divine law and expressing purity and dominion.

That the incubation period coincided exactly with the time span before our departure for vacation scared me at first. It sounded so irrevocable. But that week's Lesson-Sermon from the Christian Science Quarterly was "Are Sin, Disease, and Death Real?" I remembered from my morning study of the lesson that there was a reference in Science and Health to "the scientific period": "Sin and sickness will abate and seem less real as we approach the scientific period, in which mortal sense is subdued and all that is unlike the true likeness disappears." ^{ibid., p. 406;}

There was my perfect answer. I realized that we were approaching the scientific period, not an incubation period. And what was happening? Sickness wasn't developing, but abating, appearing less real, disappearing. Why? Because each day we were learning more of God's tender relationship to His offspring, of the total unreality of anything unlike Him.

Mentally responding to the note from school, I could say with confidence, God's children are exposed only to His love, are seen in the light of His unchanging perfection, and exist in the period of good's unfolding. I could now see the children's real substance and identity as untouched by any evil falsely called law.

But I had to apply this truth to our community. I could not claim for my children exemption from contagion and leave out the other children. The truths I had applied were equally true for all the children in that nursery school—in fact, for all the children in the world. I took a few minutes to see that clearly.

From time to time during the coming two weeks I reaffirmed the truths I had worked so closely with that afternoon. I went forward joyfully with the plans for our vacation. The children were healthy and happy the entire time. No contagious disease appeared.

Later I learned that another member of our branch Church of Christ, Scientist, one of the teachers in the children's nursery school, had also been praying for the harmonious resolution of the problem and had been clearing her own thought of any belief of contagion within the school. There was no further development of the disease among the pupils.

How grateful we all were to see that, as we read in James, "the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." ^{James 5:16.} I learned that the prompt and persistent refutation of any argument error presents is sufficient to maintain our peace, health, and harmony. And such prompt, persistent efforts help hasten the arrival of "the scientific period."