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Take up thy bed!

From The Christian Science Journal - December 11, 2013


There’s a story in the Bible of Jesus commanding a man, “Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house” (Matthew 9:6). Jesus certainly was not encouraging him to continue “sleeping”—or even sitting—on a bed of beliefs in sickness and limitation.

In thinking about this, I was reminded of when my son was in his 20s working as a cowboy. He carried his bedroll with him wherever he went. It was his official home for over a year, and whenever he visited, he brought it with him, establishing his own portable “house” on the floor. In Middle Eastern and some other countries today, as in the past, it is not uncommon for one to carry some sort of bedroll or simple mattress around as “home.”

Mary Baker Eddy expands upon the concept of home, or house, in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by replacing the word Lord with Love and house with consciousness in the 23rd Psalm, to exemplify a spiritual sense of home. It reads “… and I will dwell in the house [the consciousness] of [Love] for ever” (p. 578).

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