A few years ago my muscles started feeling stiff and sore, making it painful to lift heavy objects, walk, and climb stairs. I attributed this to my age and active lifestyle. I ride horses in 50-mile endurance rides and worried I wouldn’t be able to continue in the sport I love. The media is full of stories and advertisements for ailments associated with getting older, and I was getting sucked into believing that as I matured I wouldn’t be able to be as active.
While I prayed about this problem, I felt I was getting nowhere. What was I missing? I called my Christian Science teacher and practitioner for help, and she told me to remember that I am a symphony. At first I thought this strange as I’ve never been very musical, but I wrote it down and kept that idea at my desk.
The more I thought about it the more I saw what she was getting at. A symphony is made up of many instruments all working together in harmony to play wonderful music. I saw that I’m similarly made up of many spiritual qualities working together harmoniously and painlessly to express Life. Just as a conductor stops the orchestra when he hears a sound that isn’t correct, whenever I felt pain, I stopped and refused to accept that idea because I knew that it wasn’t from God. Because I am created in His image, as it says in the first chapter of Genesis, then that image must be perfect and painless. I replaced each painful claim with its counterfact. For example, limitation was replaced with freedom, stiffness with grace, aging with infinity, and soreness was replaced with joyful expectation.
