Preventing ill health

No one need feel helpless when symptoms of disease appear, just doing nothing while they develop into bodily discomfort or incapacity.  Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, points out something we can do to maintain sound health.  She writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:  "Stand porter at the door of thought.  Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously.  When the condition is present which you say induces disease, whether it  be air, exercise, heredity, contagion, or accident, then perform your office as porter and shut out these unhealthy thoughts and fears.  Exclude from mortal mind the offending errors; then the body cannot suffer from them."  (page 392)

Christian Science, in accord with the Bible, teaches that God is the only genuine casue, the sole creator of the universe, including man, and that the true nature of creation is spiritual, wholly good, expressing God's nature.  From the standpoint of absolue truth, all cause and effect are spiritual, and all is the perfect handiwork of God, divine Spirit.

Christ Jesus emphasized the effect of what we entertain in thought.  He said: "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man..."Those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart."  (Matthew 15:11, 18)

When one learns that thought affects every aspect of his life, he sees the necessity of replacing fearful, sickly thoughts with spiritual truths that uplift, transform, and keep one whole.  He sees the importance of conforming to the Christly standard Jesus established for all mankind.  No matter what others may be falsely believing about sickness and disease, we don't  have to abjectly surrender our peace and harmony.  We can instead exercise our God-given power over suffering.

Because you and I are actually the reflection of infinite, harmonious Spirit, and we include only those qualities Spirit imparts--peace, joy, health, dominion--the suffering and fear that may seem so real have no genuine power over us.  They are misconceptions, false beliefs, not actual, God-created conditions.  And being misconceptions, they can be corrected with the truth of man's inseparable relationship to God, of his uninterrupted well-being as God's reflection.  This truth heals.

Mrs. Eddy writes in the book I referred to above:  "Instruct the sick that they are not helpless victims, for if they will only accept Truth, they can resist disease and ward it off, as positively as they can the temptation to sin."  She continues further along:  "The fact that Truth overcomes both disease and sin reassures depressed hope.  It imparts a healthy stimulus to the body, and regulates the system.  It increases or diminishes the action, as the case may require, better than any drug, alterative, or tonic."  (page 420)

Thousand of people today are experiencing regeneration and the healing power of Truth, of almighty God.  They are successfully warding off pain and disability--proving them to be untrue.  Empowered with the Christly understanding of Truth, any one can demonstrate the fact that ill health can be prevented.

 Keeping thoughts of disease out of our thinking can not only ward off ill health;  whenwhat we may have been suffering from leaves our consciousness, we experience the wonderful freedom of divine healing.

My mother found this out when she was new student of Christian Science.  She had been a Methodist, an ardent church worker, one who was seeking a better understanding of God.  But she was saddled with several physical problems, which a kind neighbor had noticed as she tried to care for my brother and me, only 3 and 4 years old.  One day this lady brought Science and Health to her, and said that many people were being healed by just reading and pondering the statements of truth in the book.  Well, mother started reading and wasn't all the way through when a condition kind doctors had tried for years to alleviate just disappeared.  Her joy was unbounded, as you can imagine.

But the healing I'm writing about concerned a troubling skin condition that made everyday activities, especially housework, a trial.  It had been with her since teenage years.  She attended a Christian Science lecture where the speaker made clear that disease was only a mental phenomenon, that God had never man it, that it was therefore unreal, powerless.  So illumined was mother's thinking, as she walked back down the aisle of that church after the talk, the clarity of what the lecturer has said caused her to exclaim to herself:  why, I don't have to suffer with this a moment longer!  God didn't make this disease.  It has never been real, never been a part of me."

She told me later that the skin condition started clearing up right then, and within a few days, there was no evidence of it at all.  And she added, "I could feel to some extent what those lepers must have felt that were healed by Jesus."

Yes, indeed, when thoughts of ill health are replaced with God's healing truths, one cannot help but experience Christ-healing.