Don’t you love it when ideas come and bring with them a new level of spiritual understanding? In Psalm 37, the 37th verse reads, “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.” I’d thought that the first word, mark, mostly had to do with vision—to identify, find, behold, or observe. But according to Abingdon’s Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Hebrew Dictionary, the word translated mark is more active. It also means, to “protect” and even to “hedge about (as with thorns).”
Of course, I’ve never literally constructed or planted a fence of thorns around anyone. But I do see a parallel in this psalm with the activity of the Christian Science nurse as Mary Baker Eddy describes in her Manual of The Mother Church (see p. 49). A Christian Science nurse does this “hedging about” or “defending” a patient in several ways.
A Christian Science nurse is called on to strongly support a patient’s radical reliance on Truth for healing and appreciates and values the work of the Christian Science practitioner on the case. He or she is there to witness God’s power with the patient. All three, the patient, the Christian Science nurse, and the practitioner are protected by following the biblical example of purely spiritual healing and the Church Manual By-Laws, especially Article VIII with the heading “Guidance of Members.”
