Spiritual healing is for everyone - thoughts from the Sunshine Coast

How enriching it is to again read all the beautiful testimonies in Healing Spiritually.  After a month of quite sporadic reading, I’m still only part of the way through, but I thought that on this blustery final evening in June I’d just flip through some of the pages that stood out to me.

 

I love that the book begins with: “Spiritual healing is for everyone.  Everywhere.  Every day.”

My family and I were at a church service on the Sunshine Coast this morning.  It was good in so many ways: thoughtful, peaceful, stimulating, welcoming, of a high standard, with beautiful music...I was so grateful we had made the effort to catch the bus there; and grateful to those dear members who so unselfishly manned their respective posts with grace and faithfulness.  I know that each of them will have experienced spiritual healing in their lives.  So to read the testimonies in Healing Spiritually is to know that what is possible for one is certainly possible for others because God’s law operates on behalf of everyone.

 

I also love that God is available as soon as we turn to Him.  For instance, June McKnight Pierce (pp. 6 – 9) tells us that just when she was ready to pull the trigger of a gun with the intention to commit suicide, she prayed “with complete acquiescence”: “Thy will be done” from Matthew 6:10 and immediately afterwards the phone rang and the course of her life changed completely through a gentle, loving conversation with a golfing friend.  I was especially interested to read that June “pulled away from [her friend], mentally and physically” after hearing that she was a Christian Scientist (she expected to be preached at!), but the friend said “she would never mention Christian Science again unless [Joan] first mentioned it to her.”  The testimony – which includes gratitude for release from alcoholism, serious sinus infection, degenerative arthritis, and gallbladder trouble which “had occurred once or twice a year and was supposed to have been hereditary” – ends “This spiritually scientific way of life has brought me blessings too numerous to relate.” 

 

It is helpful to hear how neither an alarming physical condition (“a massive heart attack”) nor a negative medical diagnosis, equal a death sentence.  Norbert E. Updike’s testimony (pp. 9 – 12) relates how hospital physicians “insisted that [he] take medicine, about thirty pills a day”, but that “they had no effect on [him] at all once [he] left the hospital.”  Norbert was not a Christian Scientist at the time, and his wife’s sharing of some simple truths like “You are God’s perfect child” and “God’s love is the only power and presence” sustained him.  A complete healing followed.

 

A Reading Room visitor pointed out the clarity of reasoning revealed in the testimony from Anna Serdukova on pp. 20 – 21.  When Anna found herself seasick, she “said to [herself], ‘You cannot be sick, because you are an idea of God!’”  She then had to continue the reasoning and discover just why an idea could not be sick.  While pondering that query, the explanation came “like a ray of sunlight through a cloudy sky”.  This explanation has helped both my visitor and me on many occasions since.  Here’s how Anna shared her inspiration: “Suppose I had a picture of a snowflake in my mind.  It would be just my idea, of course.  Now, having that snowflake in my mind I go to a sauna, where the temperature is about 100 degrees centigrade.  The question is, can the heat make my snowflake melt?”  The conclusion of course was that just as the idea of a snowflake is not affected by the temperature, so “it would be just as impossible to make God’s idea sick by tossing it in waves.”  Her seasickness was gone!

 

From time to time we may feel that a problem just hangs around far too long.  I love how Mary B. McKeand shares some insight into how she identified deficiencies in her approach and how these were corrected in order to see resolution of the problem.  She writes “I was not diligently striving to understand the truths of Christian Science myself.”  Then it was pointed out that her “reluctance to study” must be corrected.  Also, she had to learn that death was not going to be a solution, and she “had to awaken...to realize [her] spiritual perfection” by praying with the Lord’s Prayer – which she was resisting doing!  I love that she so clearly points out the steps along the way to her healing:

1.     She learned the joy of learning;

2.     She had to then stay alert by declaring the truths she was learning; and

3.     She had to live those truths by putting them into practice, thereby proving them to be true; and finally

4.     She saw that “patient yielding to the truth that neither the body nor time govern[ed] [her] thinking” was required.

 

It’s a bit like Jesus’ teaching: we “hunger and thirst after righteousness” (Matt 5: 6) and we are filled; we “know the truth and the truth” makes us free (John 8:32); we “go and do...likewise” (Luke 10: 37).  Finally, we let go of any sense of being controlled by aught but Spirit and rest in that.  As we’ve all learned and felt in the Bible Lesson last week, the touch of the Holy Ghost is then felt as it heals, harmonizes, cleanses, relieves, corrects, rejuvenates, directs, calms – and the result is pure joy.    

 

Julie Swannell