What if our most earnest efforts to find healing through prayer seem to get nowhere, or our healings tend to take a long time? In my experience of applying the teachings of Christian Science, I've found that one of the reasons may be that the spiritual reality of perfect God and of our own perfection as His child—which underlies healing—still doesn't seem very real to us.
But this can change. We can grow to see and feel more keenly the naturalness, or reality, of spiritual perfection.
Why does it take growth if perfection is already real and natural? Because physical sense constantly presents us with the opposite of actual creation—a materialistic view, which appears quite solid and real to materialistic consciousness. Speaking of the difference between Christ Jesus and the materialists who opposed him, Mary Baker Eddy says in Science and Health, "His senses drank in the spiritual evidence of health, holiness, and life; their senses testified oppositely, and absorbed the material evidence of sin, sickness, and death." Science and Health, p. 52. Mentally absorbing what we see through material sense is easy; it's what most of us do day in and day out. To drink in "the spiritual evidence of health, holiness, and life," however, requires a change in how we think, a consecrated effort to look more consistently beyond matter to the truth of Spirit.
