Last year at Christmastime, I awoke one morning feeling very ill with flu-like symptoms. As the day progressed, though, it was filled with wonderful expressions of love, gratitude, and healing for my family. By the next evening I was cooking dinner and completely free from all symptoms of illness. I was extremely grateful for this quick turnaround and for God’s great care for me!
However, the following day a relative intentionally said something untrue and unkind about me to others, which made me very angry. By the end of the day, I started to feel ill again. Over the next few days, the flu-like symptoms returned and intensified. Despite all of this, I never felt any fear. What I felt was a need to forgive and love my relative.
Christ Jesus told us, “Love one another” (John 13:34), and further taught, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).
Since my goal was to love, fear couldn’t creep in. As the Bible promises, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear” (I John 4:18). My focus wasn’t on healing a bodily condition, but on healing a misdirected condition of thought, which could be changed through prayer, and on nurturing an enlightened understanding of God and man as God’s reflection.
As I prayed, this statement from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy took on new meaning for me: “Clad in the panoply of Love, human hatred cannot reach you” (p. 571). I had always thought of this only in regard to someone else’s hatred being unable to reach me. But now I realized that no subtle suggestion that I could hate or be angry with someone could get through that panoply.
Two things stood out to me during this time. First, I had a “Spiritual Short” about forgiveness published in the Journal (“Don’t ‘beat the horse,’ ” December 2020). I received this issue of the Journal right when I was struggling to forgive. I had to smile because I was sure the timing was not a coincidence—God was emphatically showing me the way to pray! So I prayed with the idea that I could see any erroneous action as separate from my relative; as God’s child she was innocent and free from wrongdoing. I maintained that error itself is always the culprit, and we must unmask and destroy it as a lie about God and His creation. Instead of personalizing evil, we need to see it as impersonal error with no power to influence or control.
Second, a recorded talk on Christian Science resonated with me, and my takeaway from it was that we don’t have two stories—one material and mortal, subject to sin, disease, and death, and one spiritual, reflecting the image and likeness of God, inheriting only good. We have only one true story. We can step out of and reject the illusive story of life in matter and gloriously accept our birthright as the perfect, spiritual child of God. In the case of my relative, I reasoned that there are not two stories for either of us but only one, in which each of us is a precious idea of God, living in harmony with each other.
I was also led to think more deeply about a specific line in one of Mrs. Eddy’s poems, titled “Christmas Morn,” which, referring to the Christ child, says, “Thou gentle beam of living Love” (Poems, p. 29). To focus on the significance of this idea, I repeated over and over again, mentally and verbally, that, having the same Father-Mother God as Christ Jesus had, I, too, am a gentle beam of living Love. Since that is how God sees me, that is how I began to really see myself. It gave me so much comfort to know that the real and only me could only love!
After much spiritual growth, I realized I was free from the anger and harbored no bad feelings. I was able to apologize to my relative, and she, in turn, apologized to me. We got back to our previous good relationship, and I genuinely wanted only the best for her. Naturally, all flu-like symptoms had left, too, and I was completely free of the illness.
What meant the most to me throughout this experience were Truth’s revelations and the spiritual lessons I learned about divine Love. These lessons opened my eyes to the blessings of forgiveness, which bring harmony and great peace for everyone. My heart is indeed filled to the brim with gratitude!
Lee Brother
Memphis, Tennessee, US
