God loves you!

In height he came up to about my waist, with a face full of freckles and a brush of bright red hair. And this is what healed him: "God loves you!" This youngster had been awakened in the middle of the night with a severe pain in his foot. His mother called to ask me as a Christian Scientist if I would pray to God for him, to release him from this fear and discomfort.

As I asked to speak to the young man, I saw in my mind's eye the words from I John on the wall of the Christian Science Sunday School the boy attended: "God is love." n1 With this thought totally filling my heart and desire to help, I heard myself saying, "You know, I love you. And God loves you."m

n1 I John 4:8.

His whimpering stopped. The next thing he said was that he had a new pocketknife he wanted to show me. My heart leaped with joy as I realized his attitude from an instant before had totally changed. Instead of fear and complaint, there was a normal, happy child. The pain, his mother told me later, stopped immediately, and has never returned.

"Why would the words 'God loves you' have a healing effect on the body?" one might ask. It's not just the words, but a recognition of the healing Truth behind the words, that heals. When we understand even a little of the fact that God's love rules out fear, pain, sickness, we can feel that love and begin to find healing.

Christ Jesus encouraged us to be healers in following his teachings. n2 And in Christian Science one discovers the means to follow the Master. This Science teaches us to turn to the Christ, God's message of Love and Truth to humanity; to exchange the false concept of a sick, vulnerable, and helpless mortal for a truer view of our identity as made in God's image and free from illness.

n2 See Matthew 10:8.

Watching thought is important to healing. When errors of thought, misconceptions of man's true nature, are exchanged through scientific prayer for immortal Truth, that which we call body, which is wholly governed by thought, is brought under the influence of divinely based thoughts. Thus the body manifests greater harmony, health, and peace.

This harmony appears in human experience as physical healing, but the truth of man's perfection under God has never really changed. We've just become more aware of this truth, which by its very reality has outweighed the error.

The childlike thought, whether in adults or children, is pure, unspoiled by the world. To the degree that we and our children reflect this Godlike consciousness, knowing man as God's idea alone, we come to see God as our true Parent --loving and mandating protection and safety for His offspring.

The understanding of God's parental love and care heals because it utterly routs fear and brings to light His control of every facet of man's being. God's omnipotent love goes on constantly. But we need to experience more of this love. And we can begin to do this by opening our hearts to Him, trusting and obeying Him as a child does his parent.

As true childlikeness is practically cultivated, the will of God as Father-Mother, divine Love, will be more realized in healing. The writer of those words on the Sunday School wall defining God as Love certainly must have glimpsed this healing, caring nature of divinity.

Mary Baker Eddy n3 writes: "God is Love. He is therefore the divine, infinite Principle, called Person or God." And just preceding this she states, "The Science of being reveals man as perfect, even as the Father is perfect, because the Soul, or Mind, of the spiritual man is God, the divine Principle of all being, and because this real man is governed by Soul instead of sense, by the law of Spirit, not by the so-called laws of matter." n4

n3 Mrs. Eddy is the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.

n4 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m p. 302.

In Science one's understanding of God bears direct and healing relation to one's understanding of man. To know God as Love is to begin to experience man as Love's idea. And we then are able progressively to demonstrate the healing and protecting power of Love. DAILY BIBLE VERSE The Lord hath bee n mindful of us: he will bless us. Psalms 115:12