A challenge that confronts many Christian Scientists is the severe illness of some member of the family who is not a Christian Scientist. We know, having happily proved it, that Christian Science heals, yet here mortal mind would have us struggle with a sense of self-condemnation because we have failed to get the message across and there seems to be somebody outside our concept of the healing Christ, outside because of his dependence on material rather than spiritual medicine.
To respect the wishes of the patient to put himself into the hands of doctors should not be a problem, for we want his peace of mind above all things. Yet when it comes to this point, our own instinctive distrust of material medicine clouds our thought. And if all the well-intentioned efforts of doctors do not produce the desired results, a great weight of responsibility is apt to settle on our shoulders. We know we cannot treat our dear one unasked, and yet we are tempted to believe that it is only the purity and strength of our own scientific thinking that stands between him and disaster—that for us to cease, even for a few minutes, to hold to the spiritual facts might be fatal.
Let us then be very swift to clear our own thought by affirming the basic truth of Christian Science, which is that God's universe is a universe of spiritual ideas. There are no material people in it, either well or ill—only spiritual ideas—actually no material bodies to be healed, only divine ideas to be recognized. Since all consciousness is Mind, no idea can be outside it, and those we call husband, mother, sister, are simply individual expressions of this Mind, having nothing to do with human relationship. Placing man in his true relationship to God, we can drop the mesmeric illusion that one mortal is responsible for healing another.
