Some Prayerful Thoughts

I read a lovely testimony recently. The person had been quite ill for some time, and it came to them that God did not want His children, His creations, to suffer.

The person just thought about this idea for a time and was suddenly healed.

(It was not until later that the person discovered Science and Health: With Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy and figured out how the healing had occurred, but the healing turned out to be permanent.)

This reminded me of the second line of the letter from James, where he says, “Count it all joy.”

I think we find ourselves in a very difficult place on earth. Everything we see, hear, feel, and are told suggests that the world is a terrible place, and things can only get worse.

And yet, whenever we can truly put that aside and see God’s reality—where things on earth are as they are in Heaven—the world changes. The evidence of harm vanishes, and a new picture is presented, one of harmony and beauty.

You would think once we knew this that we could heal anything, instantly.

After all, all we need to do is have faith in God and not in what world shows us, right? After all, our eyes tell us that the sun goes around the earth, but once it is explained to us that it is otherwise, we don’t go around fearing that the sun is still going around the earth. We just know it isn’t.

So it should be easy, right?

Right.

Except, it’s not.

Because we have to go through the same thing again with each and every subject.

Sometimes, we learn to rely on God for a given thing…and we find that thing easy to heal. It seems to appear; we turn to God; it vanishes.

But the next subject, when we try to tell ourselves “That’s not real. God is in charge,” our mind immediately fills in all the reasons that the appearances are to be believed.

“People will think you are an idiot if you ignore this.”
“You’ll be alone if you forgive those people and everyone else you know and like still blames them.”
“But that’s so dangerous. This terrible calamity will before me if I don’t…”

These voices in our head seem so real. Sometimes, if we try to argue that they should not hold us spellbound, we find ourself terrified or unable to even pursue such an alarming thought.

So even though we know that the sun does something different than what our eyes see, even though we know that these other five times, we saw just as real a problem, but then God removed it, we remain stymied…unable to trust in this instance.

I don’t have an answer to this, except that I have noticed that, often, if we can handle and dispense with this thought—the niggling dark thought that is keeping us from trusting—once it is gone, we’re halfway to our healing or sometimes all the way.

Almost as if it is the doubt that needs to be healed—and not the leg or the debt or the broken relationship or whatever it is we think we are praying about.

So that is my thought for today:

What about you? What are your insights about relying on God? What helps you get closer to him?

Fear not, for I am with you;
Be not dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you,
Yes, I will help you,
I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.’

(Isaiah 41:10)