Q: If you are ill and are healed, but then fall ill again with the same condition years later, does that mean the healing wasn’t complete the first time?
A: Your earlier healing brought convincing proof that the Christ operates in human consciousness to destroy the belief in illness. You saw, to a solid degree, your link with divine Love as God’s precious child. So let’s reconsider your very important question in this way: Could the healing method of the divine Principle, Love, be incomplete? Could God’s love for you ever be denied its effect? Seen in this way, your answer to the question would be a firm no.
But just as we understand that sickness is a belief, a mortal error, we need to see the aggressive suggestions that would reject Christ-healing. It’s subtle, this thought confronting you that illness has some reason to return. It is just as erroneous as the belief in the illness itself. And it is equally without substance or reality.
The healing method of Christian Science not only deepens our understanding of God; it includes alertness to the arguments against the Christ-cure. One aggressive argument is the belief in relapse or reversal. Our prayers must include a negation of this suggestion. Truth is changeless and eternal. Nothing can reverse the power and effect of the always-present Christ.
Mary Baker Eddy instructs us on how to deal with this erroneous and malicious mental attempt to reverse our healings. Her points in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures decisively reject it. She writes: “If your patient from any cause suffers a relapse, meet the cause mentally and courageously, knowing that there can be no reaction in Truth. Neither disease itself, sin, nor fear has the power to cause disease or a relapse” (p. 419).
Every Christian Science healing demonstrates that the curative energies of the divine Spirit must be, and are, all-encompassing and completely effective. This law of God is permanent, and remains continuously in operation within you and everyone.
