Accept Healing, Now!

A BEAUTY salon in our neighborhood offers immediate service to walk-ins, and guarantees ``No waiting, ever!''

Couldn't we all use more such guarantees?

Some of the hardest waiting of all has to be the waiting for physical healing, our own or that of someone dear to us, that seems to be delayed or even to be blocked altogether.

For years I had worn glasses for reading. This was frustrating because I'd had other healings relating to eyesight through my study of Christian Science. A serious eye infection had been healed, for example, and early symptoms of a disease the optometrist warned would cause eventual blindness had been corrected through prayer. But I still had to wear those glasses!

I felt I did understand at least something of what Mary Baker Eddy, the author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, had written about vision in her book. She says: ``Sight, hearing, all the spiritual senses of man, are eternal. They cannot be lost. Their reality and immortality are in Spirit and understanding, not in matter,--hence their permanence.''

There must be some special hard-to-win truth, I thought, that would enable me to read without corrective lenses. I blamed myself for the lack of spiritual insight and inspiration that was delaying my healing. Thankfully, I was wrong!

When I was asked to do a job that required a lot of reading, solving the problem became even more important to me. I worked even harder to discover what I'd been thinking or doing wrong!

Then, one morning, I suddenly found myself thinking that in his Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew's Gospel, Christ Jesus had compared God's unconditional love and acceptance to the love earthly fathers have for their children. He pointed out: ``If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?'' It came to me quite simply that no child is ever told by his father, ``You can call yourself my son, b ut not until you've learned more and grown wiser and made me proud of you.'' My own dear dad had always loved me no matter how much I'd tried his patience.

This helped me see that Christ Jesus hadn't said ``Our heavenly Father will let you be His son eventually, but only if you deserve it.'' Jesus' own great mission and victory were based on the premise that we are our heavenly Father's children now.

I had come to think of the healing I longed for as something I would only attain in the future--after I had earned it by finding some mysterious new understanding that would make me more deserving. But I was already the child of God, and I had to express, to some degree at least, the spiritual qualities God gives all His children. This included the qualities of vision, clear- sightedness, understanding. None of these qualities is dependent on the material, physical eye. They are faculties of Spirit, Mind , God. I could see that I didn't have to wait for them. They were mine now. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health: ``The great spiritual fact must be brought out that man is, not shall be, perfect and immortal.''

I began my new task, freed at last from the need to use glasses for reading even the finest print. This long-delayed healing had come immediately when I had realized the nowness of man's divine sonship. It wasn't something I or anyone else had to laboriously earn. It is already ours by right. Whenever this true status of man is truly realized, we find there is ``No waiting'' for healing. We may have many lessons to learn before we ``show forth'' our full heritage as the pure and perfect children of God. But this doesn't mean that we are any less His children now!