One day, when my son was in preschool, he came home and told me about a friend of his who had been fearful when a story about giants was read at school. A little later my son
complained of an earache. He and I talked about God’s great love for him and how there was nothing that could ever prevent him from feeling the ever-presence of God’s comforting, loving embrace. I put him down for a nap, and he slept peacefully.
While he was sleeping, I reread the Christian Science Bible Lesson for that week. One of the citations in the Lesson particularly spoke to me. It was from Second Corinthians 10:3–5 and begins, “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh.” It goes on to assure us that the weapons of our warfare are mighty, because they are spiritual, of God, and are able to cast down or destroy anything that has a strong hold on us. That includes anything we might imagine—creations of mortal, human, erring thought.
I realized that the application of the spiritual truths I was learning as I read and studied the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, were the weapons of Truth, and they were effective to cast down, cast out, or destroy any imagining—call it a giant, an idol, an earache—anything we bow down to, albeit unwittingly, as if it had power to control or cause any of God’s dear children to experience fear or discomfort.
My son knew that giants existed only in someone’s imagination, and I was able to see that the belief of an earache also existed only in imagination; it was not an image of God’s creation, which is spiritual, all-good, all-harmonious. Divine Mind, God, is the source of all our thoughts, and because these thoughts originate in Mind, they are obedient to the Mind that makes them (see Science and Health, p. 295). They are obedient to Christ, Truth. I knew that this was the answer I needed, and that my son and his friend were free from any sense of fear or dis-ease. No one could be controlled by or made to be subservient to anything that God had not caused.
When my son awoke from his nap, he expressed total joy and freedom, and was ready to run and play, with no more earache. It had truly been cast down, cast out of his experience. It was nothing, and it had never touched him.
Boston, Massachusetts, US
