DURING THE PAST WEEKS, MONTHS, AND YEARS, I've been thinking about Jesus' command, "Get thee hence, Satan" (Matt. 4:10). What a powerful cap on healing — sort of like "closing the deal," or putting the seal, so to speak, on our prayers. I know that Christian Science treatment is effective and supported by the fact that this Science is the final revelation of Truth, but occasionally patients say after treatment that their healing is just about complete —they're 80 percent to 90 percent there, but they still have some lingering symptoms.
Lately, I've been praying about a few challenges myself where that has been the case. But recently, before having to stand all day to lead a meeting, I had a wonderful healing of chronic, extreme pain in my legs. Even standing up to sing in church took an effort. Pain was dictating my day's activities. I found that I needed to pray to see my oneness with God and know that I express only what is of God. I didn't pray to heal the pain.
If, as Mary Baker Eddy wrote, "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter" (Science and Health, p. 468), then why do we think we have to heal matter? We don't. However, I couldn't just declare to myself, "There is no matter," and leave it there. So I prayed to see myself as God created me. And I began to state what I knew was true: that the body is, in reality, the substance of divine Life, Truth, and Love. So its movement is harmonious and without pain. I knew that I am a perfect expression of God. But I realized I needed to know more about who God is. The Bible says He is all-powerful. He is supreme. There is one God and one God only—"For I am God, and there is none else" (Isa. 45:22). And God is incorporeal. So I couldn't pray to Him as a corporeal being who knows sin, sickness, or death.
