How are we seeing ourselves and others from day to day? Are we seeing something of the spiritual reality of man as the expression of God, or are we constantly being taken in by the physical senses' estimate of man as a fleshly, sinful mortal? Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy says, "Let the perfect model be present in your thoughts instead of its demoralized opposite."Science and Health, p. 407 What is the perfect model? Isn't it the reality of man as upright, perfect, created by God? We need to hold to this recognition without reservation. My husband and I experienced a wonderful healing with our elder daughter that helped us to understand this point better.
During her early years in school, teachers and well-meaning friends and family were concerned about what they saw in our daughter as hyperactivity and an attention deficit disorder. One of her teachers at school was quite concerned over what she felt was our daughter's inability to complete assignments. Even at night our daughter was fretful, and there were periods of excessive rocking. We knew this was not the truth about her as God's perfect child. We prayed to understand that the only evidence we could see was the evidence of all of the spiritual qualities that were inherent in our daughter—peacefulness and calmness, unlimited intelligence, and animation derived only from Spirit, God.
The healing did not come right away. Watching our thoughts to behold only good, only what was spiritually true of our daughter, took a great deal of discipline. The demand on us was to turn wholeheartedly to God and to turn radically away from the mortal picture of hyperactivity, short attention span, and so forth. We persisted through prayer and through the expression of such qualities as patience and love in our dealings with her. Eventually the negative traits simply disappeared. She was healed! Our daughter graduated at the top of her class in high school, expressing intelligence, boundless joy, and calmness, which we saw in her all along in our perseverance through prayer.
