Let's say that you have firmly decided to pray and to study the Bible and the teachings of Christian Science until a physical difficulty yields. But after a while you feel you've done enough and decide to watch television. In that hour of viewing television, you nearly forget about the difficulty. But afterward you're suddenly aware of it again. An experience such as this could indicate that we need a higher concept of prayer and of just what it is we're doing when we pray.
When a Christian Scientist prays and studies, it is to learn more of God's goodness, of His perfection, and of how He maintains His spiritual likeness, man—our true identity—in consistent and unchanging harmony In a sense we might say that prayer is a spiritual though rousing rest— an enlightening rest in the healing and harmonizing truths of divine reality. These truths are known to us through the activity of the true idea of God, the Christ, which is ever present in consciousness. Because they emanate from the divine Principle, God, these truths, once understood, operate as law in our experience, and so dispel whatever is unlawful, such as illness and disease.
If we watch television or engage in some diversion and are temporarily less disturbed by discord or illness, all we're really doing is turning away from troubling thoughts for a while. But no difficulty is healed by such action. And yet the fact that we seem temporarily less conscious of discomfort at such times could give us a clue as to our true need. Isn't it to turn thought wholly and completely to God, to be involved fully in the spiritual truths we're learning? This leads us to discover how good God is and to gain a better understanding of our own holy, sinless, and diseaseless identity as His immortal expression.
