The flu is not inevitable

The top story of every news report I had seen for weeks was “The Flu.” (There, it just happened again, flu is at the top of this report!) Not only was it at the top of every news report, it was the subject of almost every commercial. It was the topic of conversation.

It’s now late January, so it’s not so unusual for the flu to be in the news. But this time it seemed to me to be a little different. This time there seemed to be an intensity that I hadn’t seen before, more of a suggestion of inevitability that everyone would get it.

“Inevitable” is a word that means impossible to avoid or prevent. However, I questioned this inevitability. As a student of Christian Science I’ve learned that things are not always as they seem, disease being one of those things. I’ve learned to look for the source of something to understand its nature. What is the source of the flu? Is it germs invading a material body? Does this explanation have its source in God, the creator of all things? The Bible tells us, “God is love” (I John 4:16). I couldn’t reconcile the thought of a loving God subjecting His creation to disease. I had a choice. I could be fearful about the inevitability of catching the flu, or I could trust that God was loving and caring for me. Could I trust God?

I had a chance to find out a few days later. I had a restless night. I awoke with all the symptoms the media defined as relating to flu. I tried my best to proceed with my day. However, in the afternoon I returned to bed. I couldn’t get comfortable enough to fall asleep, so I decided to turn my thought away from my misery and concentrate on something else. Immediately the thought came to me to think good – as in divine good, or Godlike – thoughts. So I thought about what God would be thinking about me, how He loved me and how He could never see me as being anything other than the way He made me, pure and perfect. I fell asleep.

When I awoke I was completely free from every symptom. It wasn’t as though I was just rested and better; it was as though I had never had a single one of the symptoms. Although the symptoms had been quite evident both to me and my family, now they were gone. I was completely and unmistakably my regular self again.

More than just a quick fix of the flu, this dramatic change indicated to me an underlying principle of perfection. This perfect state of being was understood and even required by Jesus, who said, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). If, in reality, our state of being is always perfect, we can rely on our understanding of this to correct any misconception that we are diseased or imperfect in any way. When we do away with misconceptions, they disappear. When we do away with the misconception of disease, it disappears from our experience.

Don’t we owe it to ourselves and others to “be perfect” in this way, not to see disease of any kind as inevitable? Mary Baker Eddy discovered that disease was not the solid reality it claimed to be but instead was a misconception of reality, the reality that Jesus taught us about, the reality that God, good, creates. She wrote, “To divest thought of false trusts and material evidences in order that the spiritual facts of being may appear, – this is the great attainment by means of which we shall sweep away the false and give place to the true” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 428). She taught that as we do this that we, too, can eliminate disease from our lives and the lives of others.

This experience proved to me that I could trust God. God is Love. What is truly inevitable is God’s love for His perfect creation.

For an Italian translation of this article, see The Herald of Christian Science.