Rebuild Your Thinking
It's no small job to renovate a high-rise building. Believe me, I know. I've been sitting (comfortably!) in my workplace, watching a construction crew giving the hotel across the street a complete makeover.
They started by emptying out the furnishings from the rooms. Then they began to remove all the windows and put in new ones. Two months into the work, they had just finished changing the windows on one side of the building, and were just beginning work inside the rooms. As the saying goes, I got tired just watching.
I also got inspired by watching. That visible reconstruction work reminded me to get on with some invisible work of a similar nature. The Bible says, "Be renewed in the spirit of your mind" (Eph. 4:23). Not that God has me, or anyone else, singled out for this demand; it's universal. This Scripture was written by the Apostle Paul to Christians in Ephesus. But I see it as identifying God's call to all, always, to improve our thinking and our actions, to better express what it means to be God's child.
Christ Jesus showed that we all are children of God. The love he expressed had healing effects on others. There are always ways for us to refurbish our own thoughts and to renew our lives by expressing that same love. To construct our attitude, moment by moment, on a charitable basis. To develop a more heartfelt, practical spirit of care for our neighbor. In this we, too, can heal.
It may seem more demanding to answer this call than to rebuild an aging hotel. For a start, no outside crew can be hired to make it happen. It takes your own persistence, prayer, and individual obedience to the guidance that comes from God alone. While there is no formula for finding divine guidance, it is not elusive. It will inevitably require you to replace false concepts of God with new views of Him and of the perfect creation that is His alone.
How can this take place? According to "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," by Mary Baker Eddy - the same person who established this newspaper - "The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in truth through flood-tides of Love" (Pg. 201).
"Mortal mind" indicates thoughts that are not true - not good and Godlike, but rather selfish and unloving. Reconstructing thought, spiritually, means learning that God made us to reflect His good nature. It's through expressing God's nature that hateful thinking and bad attitudes begin to disappear; we see them to be false because they contradict the perfect identity God gives each one of us. In truth, we are always spiritual, holy, happy, at peace.
The Science of Christ prompts a person to learn of God and to let His love cleanse and purify thought, bringing it into line with a view of being that is Godlike. Understanding the perfect individuality God gives to us all reduces and removes the belief that there is any opposite state of being.
When we perceive the spiritual nature of existence, the things that are of concern to us in daily life are beneficially affected. Relationships, income, employment, and even hopes for humanity are blessed and made better by spiritually improved thinking. In fact, this mental reconstruction work, this activity of emptying out wrong thoughts and letting right thoughts be established in obedience to God's direction, even heals the human body of suffering and sickness.
I saw vivid proof of this fact when I suffered from a very uncomfortable skin condition. I prayed diligently for healing, as I am used to doing when I am unwell. It came to me through my prayer that I needed to put behind me a lifestyle choice not in line with the Ten Commandments, the timeless moral guidelines of Judeo-Christian living. In addition, I caught a glimpse of the spiritual fact that because sickness is not good it could not have been created by God, and therefore could not be true for me as the expression of God. The skin condition then disappeared.
In this case, there was visible, outward reconstruction of the body. But the inner, mental renewal that produced it has been especially precious to me. This relationship between spiritual regeneration and physical healing parallels the words and works of Jesus, showing how spiritual renewal remains a viable means of healing today.
