I WOKE UP with a stiff neck and shoulder. And I also had back pain. For years I had occasionally visited a chiropractor whenever I felt that my back or neck was out of alignment. I knew from experience that the chiropractor could adjust my spine in one visit and I would leave in alignment. However this time, having recently begun the study of Christian Science, I resisted the urge to make an appointment with a chiropractor, knowing that God could heal me. But for days the pain and stiffness persisted. Then it occurred to me that the only thing that needed adjustment was my thought. I realized that God could adjust my thinking, and that would bring me into proper alignment.
At church that Sunday, I heard a lovely solo that included the idea that divine Love gives me eyes to see the arms of everlasting Love, and that thought stayed with me. I reasoned that everlasting means eternal, timeless, indestructible. That night before I went to bed I picked up Science and Health and randomly opened it to this statement, "Hold perpetually this thought,—that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being" (p. 496). It stuck out to me that Love is encompassing all true being. That explained to me the meaning of the hymn that begins, "Everlasting arms of Love/Are beneath, around, above;..." (Christian Science Hymnal, No. 53). I realized that this also meant that Love was universal—encompassing everyone and everything. I began to realize that if all was already in the everlasting arms of Love, I could see everything and everyone as already perfect.
The next day, I held to that idea. In various challenging situations that asserted that pain, strife, fear, and inharmony were real and affecting people, I kept knowing that Love gives me eyes to see the arms of everlasting Love. I remembered that I didn't need to change a situation or someone else. I only needed to change my own thought, since all being was already held in those perfect loving arms of God. Since perfection was the only state of reality, my responsibility was to bring my thought into alignment with God. All was already in perfect adjustment and alignment.
