If we were to ask God what the most important thing is that we’re supposed to take away from any healing experience we have in Christian Science, wouldn’t God be saying to us, “That I love you and am with you and am completely caring for you”? Those who’ve experienced such healing invariably feel more of a sense of living moment by moment with their hand in God’s hand, and with a faith in God that is unmixed with doubt, human will, or fear.
There’s something truly ineffable about the experience of God’s actuality. Whatever else was calling for attention, however large a problem loomed, it all dissolves in the face of an all-embracing, palpable sense of holiness and harmony that can only be described as infinite Love. We’re not left with a small sense of Christian Science treatment that says prayer is good at fixing a particular material problem. We’re left with an immense sense of invitation to live more within the infinitude of God, where material problems lose their influence, substance, and power. This invitation is what the Apostle Paul was voicing when he said to his listeners, “That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:27, 28).
But we all know very well that none of this happens in a vacuum. It happens amidst an unrelenting barrage of assertions from the material senses that argue the opposite. All the messages about ways to feel better in the body, and things like medical ads holding out supposedly simple solutions to complex problems, don’t just sit on a shelf somewhere apart from us, saying, “I’m here if you’re interested.” Rather, they assert we’ve already agreed to their conclusions, or maybe are already feeling what’s being described. And before we know it, the sense of joy and health that we yearned for, and rejoiced that we had from God, feels dependent upon certain material conditions before it can be realized.
