Through the centuries many people have prayed fervently and expectantly, have prayed to God with humble trust in His power to guide and protect them and to lift them out of difficulties. For example, the Psalmist prayed, "What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee." Ps. 56:3. A Muslim once prayed: "O my Lord, let security and truth precede and follow me wherever You lead me. Let authority and succour from Your presence be with me." The Oxford Book of Prayer, ed. George Appleton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 329 . More recently, a schoolgirl in Africa prayed, "O thou great Chief, light a candle in my heart, that I may see what is therein, and sweep the rubbish from thy dwelling place." Ibid., p. 108 . Christ Jesus magnificently demonstrated the power of prayer over sin, disease, and mortality while he was on earth. But as centuries passed, a personal, material sense of God obscured the practical, healing effect of the true Christianity he taught. A concept of God as knowing and allowing both good and evil, as sometimes helping and healing and sometimes punishing, diminished the active expectancy that prayer can heal, and interfered with the demonstration of divine power.
Basic to Mary Baker Eddy's discovery of Christian Science in the mid-nineteenth century was her realization that God is perfect and that He knows and creates only perfection. When prayer is based on this true understanding of God, which is demonstrable, we know ourselves as He already knows us, and see concrete evidence of the harmony He has established. We are not begging Him to change things for us, because He provides only good for His offspring. We pray with scientific certainty as we understand the perfection of God, and man's consequent perfection as His image and likeness. Christian Science reveals that God is divine Principle, and that the power and harmony of divine Principle can be proved in every aspect of our lives, including the attainment of freedom from disease.
Effective, healing prayer begins with God. Isn't our need in prayer to identify ourselves as the perfect outcome of this magnificent creator, rather than think we need to inform Him of a predicament? God already knows everything that is true of man, and that's all that has authority or reality in our lives. We do not, then, need to tell Him anything; we need quietly to ponder His nature and what He eternally knows of us.
