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A fresh view of health care

A Christian Science perspective.

  • By Curt Wahlberg

Amid all the latest discussion about health care, insurance, and changing governmental policy or regulations, there looms at least one profound and pressing question: Who is it that has a say in an individual’s health?

It just may be that the answer to this question is what will settle all health-care debate as well as any concerns on the various sides.

Do elected officials, governmental regulators, insurance company executives, and doctors get the power to determine how my health is going to turn out? Much of the discussion suggests so. There’s concern that even the day-to-day choices of strangers across the country have an indirect impact on the state of the insurance coverage and health care that I’ll be able to receive.

The Bible and the experience of many people suggest something very different from all of this.

When it comes to health care and the means to cover any needs that I have, I deeply take to heart Jesus’ counsel: “[S]eek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). I find that my health and well-being, along with the means to pursue it, are entirely between me and God alone. All good for my life is a gift from God that I am free to find and claim. In fact, in endeavoring to see that my life and health are determined only by God and provided abundantly by God, I’ve found great results.

Last year, for example, I had some problems with my right foot. It looked fine, but the joints and bones caused me a fair amount of pain. This persisted for a few months. I hungered to feel in the deepest way that God was the basis of my life. Really, my life belonged to Him. My purpose is to serve Him in some good way every day, and to let His nature permeate my being. Well, this effort had an impact on my entire consciousness. And the pain and all problems related to my foot have been gone for several months.

I think I would say I now feel less like a helpless mortal blown around by the world and more like the spiritual idea or expression of our creator, who the Bible tells us is infinite Spirit or divine Love.

Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy wrote: “Mortals are free moral agents, to choose whom they would serve. If God, then let them serve Him, and He will be unto them All-in-all” (“Unity of Good,” p. 60). To a great degree, I’m finding this true. God is the infinite Spirit, or Mind, that created and maintains the universe and whose presence is here to be found in the minutiae of our lives and who tends to the details of our care.

The experience with my foot was an important example for me. My family also has had plenty of experiences illustrating how, in each of the many places we’ve lived and with whatever amount of insurance coverage we’ve had, God has provided great healing while guiding us with whatever we’ve needed in terms of assistance for eye care, prenatal care, dental work, and so on.

God is not as irrelevant to the health-care discussion as it often sounds. On the contrary, God is always central to any subject. And God is unlimited goodness, with answers and healing for everyone. We all are able to see this divine goodness as the determining factor for our health.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

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