It’s those little shifts in thought that blow a concept wide open. One changed word can move you out of a familiar rut, and suddenly you see you’ve been holding to a somewhat limited concept. Well, that happened to me just recently.
For years I had heard and accepted the simple phrase, “God does the healing.” I appreciated this, because it reminded me that although my profession is as a Christian Science practitioner, it’s not up to me personally to heal people. It’s the truth of God’s allness and of man as God’s perfect image and likeness that corrects the mistaken impression that God is not all and that anyone is a fallen mortal, subject to sin, disease, and death. And I still really appreciate this truth.
But the other day as I was praying, the simple phrase, “God is the healing,” came to thought. Such a small change of words, and yet the implication was huge. I realized that every time I had acknowledged that “God does the healing,” I had been unwittingly holding on to a sense of God imparting some inspiring truths about a needy situation to some people—perhaps me and/or the person I was praying with—and this impartation would correct the problem, and if we properly applied the truths of God’s allness to the situation, then the problem would go away. But there’s a flaw in that reasoning. Somehow, I was reinforcing a multiplicity of factors and variables, involving God and me and another person and a problem, and trying to know that God would be the bottom line.
