Praying for others, as people awakening to prayer's effectiveness are increasingly doing, is certainly impelled by a sincere desire to help. It's important to recognize, though, that healing prayer in its truest sense involves something other than reshaping a familiar material world—even to benign ends. It involves discovering the perfect, spiritual reality that God has established and eternally maintains.
The conventional scene we call "reality" is not durable substance, as it seems to be. In accord with the Bible, Christian Science affirms that the one creative power is God, divine Spirit. So His universe, framed by Spirit, must be spiritual. It follows that an individual's real being doesn't consist of physical elements. It's incorporeal, formed and sustained by Spirit.
Healing in its deepest sense, then, isn't the adjusting of an organism, whether by physical or mental means. It's an awakening in some degree to spiritual reality, and flows from that pure blending in prayer with divine Spirit that enables us to perceive man in his original, God-created being. It involves forsaking impressions of man as a physical personality and cherishing the holy qualities that are an individual's essence. This prayerful surrender to the very wellsprings of being, which are spiritual, brings God-given identity more clearly to light on the human scene. Healing follows. This isn't really a rearrangement of matter but a quickened sense of genuine being, which we see humanly as restoration.
