Preventing Seasonal Suffering

        Happy to see  your favorite season roll around, but  unhappy to think of the ailments generally associated with it?  You can stop dreading certain times of the year.  Seasonal suffering can be prevented.  Freedom, ability, and health can be maintained the whole year through--without interruption.  The preventive art taught by Christian Science is available to all of us, and offers more than partial or temporary relief.

        I love this statement by Mary Baker Eddy, the woman who discovered and founded Christian Science.  She writes:  "A calm, Christian state of mind is a better preventive of contagion than a drug, or than any other possible sanative method, and the 'perfect Love' that 'casteth out fear' is a sure defense".  This is from an article titled "Contagion" and it is found in the collection of her writings, Prose Works.

        This assurance of immunity from suffering is not mere theory; I have experienced it many times over the years when symptoms of this or that ailment loomed.  I've learned to see that God's man is inherently pure and whole--not a mortal, flesh-and-blood creature who is subject to certain afflictions.  We are actually God's spiritual offspring, not at the mercy of whatever disease is believed to be prevalent, not helpless before fear or sickness.  Divine Love, the tender Father of all, by vitue of His allness, excludes whatever is unlike His pure nature.  This truth destroys any supposed evidence that we could be subject to suffering.

        The Science of Christ teaches the importance of realizing that matter, or physicality, can't talk or lay out conditions for us.  That which claims to possess power coequal with God does not; nor can it interfere with His governing of us.  There is no material intelligence to oppose God, divine Mind.  What's more, the loving Father is never telling us we're fearful, weak mortals in a vulnerable situation.  Throughts from the one Mind, the Mind we all uninterruptedly reflect, reveal our divine right to the wholeness that is continually ours as Mind's beloved manifestation.  These comforting, healing, redeeming ideas are pouring forth perpetually.  Our role is one of listening with humble, unclouded receptivity.  The more consistently we maintain this holy state of consciousness, the greater our spiritual conviction that God is all-powerful and ever present.

        Regardless of what disease outbreaks may be predicted, the fact remains that God is the only power and presence, and man is inseparable from His omnipotence.  Armed with these spiritual truths, we can prove the immuniyt that divine Love gives us from contagion and demonstrate our eternal unity with God, good.

        Because we are God's, Love's, offspring, we have a sure basis for living free of the fear of suffering.  In truth, we remain the way our creator conceived and constituted us.  When God finished His work, the Bible says, He pronounced it very good.  It is the material view of things that is incorrect, such as the belief that something is part of us that God neither put there nor sees.  In God--in divine, infinite Love, where each of us has his true, uninvadable being--there is no sickness, no pain, no fear, to make encroachments on our health and well-being.

        In summing up, you and I can prove for ourselves that true immunity from seasonal suffering and abiding peace of mind, are found in the consciousness of God's omnipresence and perfect control of our lives.  As one of the many passages in the Scriptures that offer a way out of fear of contagion states, "In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me."  (Psalms 56:4)