Worthy of healing

Once when my teen-age nephew visited in my home, he asked me why I studied the Bible and prayed so much. I replied that I depended on God as my sole source of healing and sought His help for every detail of my life. I didn't realize that I had answered inadequately until I heard him exclaim, ''Oh, my! I just don't think it's right to bother God with all that!''

The disparity of our viewpoints stemmed from our differing concepts of God. From his point of view, it would be an imposition to ask an already overloaded Person--even a Super-person--to take on more burdens. From my point of view, if everyone simultaneously applied an omnipotent Principle, the healing worth of that Principle would never be exhausted any more than worldwide, repeated performance of an opera could disturb or deplete the music.

Of course, both perfecting an opera performance and demonstrating the laws of God, Principle, require disciplined practice. But we all have the spiritual capacity to heal and be healed, to demonstrate divine Principle. Whoever has felt unworthy of healing can learn and prove that worthiness comes from a source other than a mortal, material sense of identity.

A true feeling of worth comes from God. The man of God's creating--the spiritual individuality of each of us--is so worthy, in fact, as to never need healing. Man is God's reflection and can never image forth less or more than the completeness and perfection of his creator, infinite Mind.

Because worthiness inheres in each of us, we need but to fearlessly claim and faithfully practice our natural godliness in order to bring it forth. Thus we demonstrate our God-derived freedom from whatever failing we might be tempted to accept as inevitably our own.

Even when we have learned to accept our own worth in some degree, we may be tempted to think our opportunities for healing are unworthy. On one occasion I went to Colorado Springs for a vacation--my first visit there since a childhood trip when the rest of the party went up Pike's Peak and I remained behind. The family doctor had forbidden me to travel in the mountains because I had a congenital heart condition. Since then, however, Christian Science had healed me of that condition. Still, I wondered if it was asking too much to take a pleasure trip up Pike's Peak. Would it be more humble to stay behind rather than ''bother God with all that''?

Praying about my decision, I studied the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. There I found this wonderful reassurance: ''Mind, joyous in strength, dwells in the realm of Mind. Mind's infinite ideas run and disport themselves. In humility they climb the heights of holiness.''n1

n1 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 514.

What a joyous trip it was, with panoramic vistas at every turn made brighter by my newfound awareness of the humility that fully claims the divine right of man to be healthy and free. In the nearly thirty years since that day I have traveled wherever our route took us, sometimes at heights greater than lofty Pike's Peak, with only good effects. I now realize that I was never a mortal with a heart condition--that mortal man is but a mortal dream from which Christian Science study and practice is progressively awakening me.

It takes true humility (absolute subordination to the truth of being) to claim our worthiness to heal and be healed. True humility enables us to claim for ourselves what the mortal sense of self could neither fully earn nor faintly prove. After all, it was not after the glorious close but prior to the humble commencement of Christ Jesus' ministry that God declared of him, ''This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.''n2

n2 Matthew 3:17.

In our real being we, too, are God's beloved children. The truth is that we are perfect and complete. All of truth is worthy of expression--is expressed. No error--no sin, pain, lack, or sorrow - is worthy of time or place or reason to exist. No proof we make of this is insignificant to our salvation. Every individual, every situation that could possibly confront us, is worthy of healing. DAILY BIBLE VERSE It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Luke 12:32