Relying on Prayer for Christian Healing

ELBOW GROWTH HEALED

Two or three months ago I glanced down at my left elbow and saw that it was three or four inches longer than usual.

I must confess, I was rather alarmed.   

It seemed to be some sort of growth. 

Rather than dwell on that distasteful possibility, I got to work knowing that no material growth could fasten on me - a spiritual, divine idea. That seemed to put any fear to flight and I immediately vowed not to look at the unsightly excrescence again.

As one does when confronted with any lie of matter, I immediately recalled that wonderful line from Science & Health, the Christian Science textbook: “A spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive.” (S&H 463:12-13)

It certainly was offensive to find that one was affording sanctuary to what appeared to be a grotesquely enlarged elbow. Recoiling from the notion, it occurred to me that one of error’s standard ploys is to suggest that something is growing in some remote fastness of one’s body and it will be a challenge, if not an impossibility to remove it.

It’s absolute bunkum, of course. Science and Health abounds in razor-sharp quotes that consign suggestions like that to outer darkness.  

For instance, as Mary Baker Eddy writes: “There is but one primal cause. Therefore there can be no effect from any other cause, and there can be no reality in aught which does not proceed from this great and only cause.”  (S&H 207:20)  And that cause, as we know, is God - and as Mrs. Eddy insists: “God is everywhere, and nothing apart from Him is present or has power." (S&H: 473:8-10)

Recalling that Mrs. Eddy urges us to “speak the truth to every form of error”  while noting that “tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed joints are waking dream shadows, dark images of mortal thought which flee before the light of Truth.” (S&H:418:29) And so that’s what I did. I spoke the truth to it as vigorously as I knew how. I insisted that I was a radiant reflection of God, a beam of spiritual light, an image of love upon which no growth could possibly affix itself.

Increasingly convinced that I couldn’t suffer from a misshapen elbow, I continued to refuse to inspect the absurd evidence that I could. 

I claimed the uninvadable harmony that we all enjoy as God’s spiritual ideas. And when I glanced at my elbow a week or so later it was as trim and sun-tanned, and as properly proportioned, as it had ever been. 

I’d had a complete healing.

I can’t tell you how grateful I am that Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy’s incalculable gift to mankind, was perfectly capable of meeting such an offensive suggestion head-on and consigning it to oblivion.  

And it can do it for every single one of us, Christian Scientist or non-Christian Scientist, who might be confronted with such a foul lie about one’s spiritual identity as God’s thoroughly flawless child.