My eight-year-old daughter came in from playing outside one day, very scraped-up and in pain from a fall. We prayed with the truths we had learned in our study of Christian Science. Christian Scientists and others, all over the world, study The Holy Bible, along with Mary Baker Eddy’s major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, on a daily basis. These two books gave my daughter and me the foundation from which to pray in that moment of need.
Essentially, we prayed to see what God sees. Since God is perfect and can only see perfection, God was seeing my daughter’s perfection right then and always. Because God can’t be injured, neither could she, since she reflects God’s perfection at all times. God’s child is a spiritual idea at all times, and an idea can’t be damaged or in pain. As a spiritual idea of God, she could never fall out of that perfection.
The healing came that same day when we realized that the truth of her unfallen perfection was there first, and that this appearance of injury was only a counterfeit-picture, a lie about God’s child. After all, the very nature of the counterfeit of anything is that a counterfeit only presents itself after the original has been established. Otherwise, the counterfeit (something not authentic) would be the original. The counterfeit claims authenticity, but it will never have any, because it is not the original. It can’t be first because the truth is first. The pain stopped, my daughter went out to play, and the scrapes healed up shortly after.
That angel thought about the ‘truth being there first,’ has helped with many challenges over the years. In the Bible, in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, we read that God created man (man, woman, and child) in His image and likeness, and He gave us dominion over all the earth. That first chapter in Genesis also tells us that everything God made, was very good! This is the truth that was there first and forever, and can’t be opposed by an opposite claim (counterfeit). The perfection of God and man is always intact and secure, and it always has been. When the counterfeit picture tries to tell us something different, we have but to cling steadfastly to ‘perfect God and perfect man.’ Then we are seeing what God is always seeing about us. I love the Bible passage from Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end”, and that expected end is harmony.
With much gratitude, BM