Christ comes to us in the way we need
Even when we’re facing persistently challenging situations, we can know that the Christ is already there, ready to convey the truth that will set us free.
The Bible shows us how Jesus always spoke with great love and authority, and with these qualities he healed all kinds of diseases and disabilities. His complete conviction of God’s power over all limitations was such that sometimes all he needed to speak was a single word to uplift a situation.
In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, we read about Jesus sending his disciples ahead of him in a ship. Later, he walks on the water to catch up to them. The disciple Peter is filled with the spiritual desire to do as Jesus is doing. He tells his teacher, “Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water” (Matthew 14:28). Jesus responds in one word, “Come,” and with that he sweeps away any doubt or fear that his student might have. Peter steps out of the ship onto the waves, and walks to meet Jesus. Even when Peter begins to doubt, Jesus reaches out, catches him, and saves him.
Mary Baker Eddy refers to this biblical moment in her poem “Christ my refuge,” writing, “O’er earth’s troubled, angry sea / I see Christ walk, / And come to me, and tenderly, / Divinely talk” (“Poems,” p. 12). Her textbook on Christian Science, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” defines Christ as, “the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness” (p. 332). Jesus was the embodiment of this spiritual idea.
What I love about this revelatory understanding of the Christ is that it “comes to us.” In my practice of Christian Science, I have found this to be true, even in the most pressing circumstances. If we feel overwhelmed by the difficulties of a situation we are facing, I have learned that we can rest assured that those challenges are powerless in the face of the Christ, which is at one with our all-good and ever-present God.
I experienced the power of the presence of Christ last summer. At one point, I became aware of a prickly sensation under one of my eyelids. I assumed that a particle of some kind had lodged there, and I looked for it repeatedly in the mirror. Although I didn’t find anything, the uncomfortable sensation persisted, and at times my vision became blurry. I started to wonder whether something more serious was going on.
I knew from experience that prayer in Christian Science is able to heal whatever the problem seems to be, so I got to work declaring my untarnished being as God’s spiritual child. I pondered the sentence in Science and Health that says, “A spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive” (p. 463). I felt uplifted by testimonies in the Christian Science periodicals, where individuals had experienced the removal of significant obstructions in their bodies by understanding this same truth.
Then, one day as I was driving to work, the discomfort became much more insistent, to the point that I had to close my eye. Rather than panic, however, I knew I needed to open my spiritual “eye” to “see Christ ... com[ing] to me.” I humbly and expectantly waited for the Christ message, and sure enough, it came. I saw in a moment of powerful, sweet inspiration that rather than the particle in my eye being offensive, what was really offensive was the thought that I could ever be separated from God, our perfect Father-Mother, who flawlessly created us.
I felt the Christ tell me with great love and authority that this thought was the only thing that needed removal. I took my hand off my eye and drove to work, thrilled with the power of this new inspiration. By the time I got there, the sensation that had bothered me for a couple of months was simply gone, and it has not returned.
It is vitalizing to know that Christly authority is just as much with us today as it was when Jesus pulled Peter from the waves. Christ comes to us, speaking in a language that is just what we need to be transformed and healed.