God's Healing Love Endures
FROM time to time we like to visit a certain country town. There are fields of wildflowers, sweet water in the brooks, and mountains. Beautiful, huge, immovable mountains. It's the mountains that refresh me most during these visits. They symbolize for me the permanence of the things of God. And during a recent visit, they reminded me of the permanence of His healing love.
We were driving to this town, and about a half hour before our arrival, once again the mountains appeared in the distance and cheered me with their dependability and strength. They made me think about God's everlasting love for man and the universe, a love that is infinitely more unshakable and strong than even the mountains. A Bible verse from Isaiah came to mind: ``The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.''
Now, it's not too likely that the hills are about to be moved. But when there is upheaval in our lives and even the most dependable things on earth are being shaken up, we can be sure of the continuity of divine Love. What's more, we can be equally certain that the healing influence of divine Love, God, remains. This is important, because nothing conveys more clearly the reality of God's love than pure spiritual healing. Such healing was practiced to perfection by Christ Jesus and reintroduced to the world through Christian Science. It is God's permanent gift of grace; it cannot be removed.
The night we drove to the country I became ill and very much needed to feel Love's healing care. There was pain, and I couldn't sleep. After praying for some time, I recalled something I'd read a few days earlier in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. It was this: ``To infinite, ever-present Love, all is Love, and there is no error, no sin, sickness, nor death.''
I felt that this statement was an invitation to consider a higher, more spiritual view of existence -- a view that sees man not as a fragile physical structure but as God's spiritual likeness. Since Love is infinite, I thought, it is forever boundless and unconditional. Since Love is ever present, the tender mercies of God were right there with me, and with everyone, filling all space. Finally, since all is Love, all that really exists expresses Love and is good. Anything unlike Love, such as pain or fear, must not, then, be as substantial and real as it seems to be, because there is no room for evil in God's allness.
The pain retreated steadily, and soon I was well again. I was grateful, not just because sickness left, but because in its place was a quiet, sacred sense of God's presence and the certainty that Love's ability to heal would never cease to be. I woke up the next morning feeling a deeper spiritual and physical peace than I'd known in a long time.
Divine Love is the everlasting Principle of the universe, and man is Love's cherished image. Materialistic views of man, and of healing, leave the heart cold, comfortless, without God. But each instance of spiritual healing confirms the continuity of God's love in our lives as the mighty, living reality that it is. ``God is not the shifting vane on the spire,'' Mrs. Eddy writes in Unity of Good, ``but the corner-stone of living rock, firmer than everlasting hills.''
His healing love endures.
