Was just talking to a neighbor who was also enjoying the almost summerlike weather after so many frigid days. We got into a discussion about today's front-page article in The New York Times on opioids. This focused on the problem in New Hampshire where it like many states in the US have aa crisis on their hands. This lady, who confessedly is not religious, who doesn't even believe in God she told me, said something so interesting. "My doctor keeps trying to make me take opioids, but I refuse. I don't want to become addicted. I blame the current epidemic on the doctors and the pharmaceutical companies."
As I walked back in the house, couldn't stop thinking about being healthy and staying that way without dependence on drugs. Being a student of Christian Science with its focus on turning to God for health and well-being, I felt so grateful no one has to go the way of possible addiction to pain-killers.
It is a source of comfort to many men and women that there is a way disease can be healed through a deepening understanding of God, Spirit. The Bible speaks of God's all-power, and it tells of people through the ages who have proved His uplifting and healing power. One of the many passages in the Scriptures that convey the confidence inspired by spiritual understanding is this one from Psalms: "In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me."
To overcome illness does not mean ignoring it but rather involves undermining its very foundation. Many people are doing through applying the liberating and strengthening spiritual truths found in Christ Jesus' teachings. The Master understood fully the inseparability of man from God. He knew that man is God's child, spiritual, whole, and eternally perfect in Him. Discerning something of our real being as God's spiritual image, and expressing the purity that characterizes that being, we can come to feel the assurance of God's healing help. It is experienced to the degree that we are aware of God's omnipresence and perfect upholding of His creation, of you and me and everyone else.
Jesus' healings illustrate that man is not truly a fleshly mortal at the mercy of whatever disease happens to be prevalent; that man is not helpless when confronting disease. Moreover, Jesus promised his followers, ,"If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
Everyone can learn the truth that God is omnipotent, and that man is the likeness of God. As the image of his creator, man forever expresses the divine nature. And because God is Spirit, man is spiritual. To be sure, we appear to be merely flesh and bones and subject to suffering. But physicality isn't the actual or ultimate substance of our being. Life in the flesh is a misconception of man, whose real identity as the image of God is incorporeal, untouched by debilitating physical conditions.
In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the woman who discovered and founded Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy writes: "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation. Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural. They are the sign of Immanuel, or 'God with us,' -- a divine influence ever present in human consciousness and repeating itself, coming now as was promised aforetime,
To preach deliverance to the captives [of sense],
And recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty that are bruised."
With the Christly understanding that a study of Christian Science brings, anyone can turn to God for every aspect of his health and well-being, proving to his own satisfaction that joy that "the Lord will take away from thee all sickness."
