Allergic reactions healed

Lois Degler | from the Christian Science Sentinel

This writer’s allergies are healed when she wakes up to an aspect of her spiritual identity.

I love being outside, especially walking around my small yard, recognizing new growth, appreciating each lovely bloom, clipping, trimming, and weeding as necessary. Making order. But last spring and early summer, after spending time in my yard, I had itchy red welts on my lower body. This was an irritation, but certainly not a serious condition. So I just kept scratching and complaining. And then, suddenly, I had lots of welts and lots of itching. At that point, I realized I could pray about this. Serious or not, why should I put up with a condition that was clearly not made by God?

I considered a familiar Bible story from Luke about Jesus’ travel back to his hometown of Nazareth. While there he announced that God had appointed him to preach and to heal. But many were angry at his claims and doubted his words. Jesus reprimanded them for not believing he was sent by God. And they were so “filled with wrath” that they threw him out of the city and took him to the edge of a hill, intending to throw him off. Yet the account concludes that Jesus simply passed through the mob unharmed, and went on to another city (see Luke 4:14–32).

Because of God’s care, I could be safe from any attack.

While Jesus’ situation was significantly more dire, I still saw a message there for me. Because of God’s care, I, too, could be safe from any attack. I thought about God’s allness and goodness and how He encompasses and defines His creation as all good. So each spiritual idea is part of a larger whole, and these spiritual identities relate in ways that cannot cause hurt. Praying with these spiritual facts was very comforting.

Thinking more deeply about Jesus’ experience, I wondered, “How is it that Jesus stayed safe?” He was surrounded by an angry mob intent on hurting him. But he was never touched.

The spiritual idea that came to me was, “Jesus wasn’t in that dream.” Dream is a word that Mary Baker Eddy used in her writings to illustrate the fact that whatever seems to be real, but isn’t like God, has no more reality—power or effect—than a dream. She wrote, “Mortal existence is a dream of pain and pleasure in matter, a dream of sin, sickness, and death; and it is like the dream we have in sleep, in which every one recognizes his condition to be wholly a state of mind” (Science and Health, p. 188). When we’re in a dream, it all seems real. When we wake up from a dream, the dream “reality” disappears.

Jesus’ persecutors were angry, hateful, bent on destroying him. It could be said that they were mentally in that “dream reality”—identifying themselves with hateful qualities and acting on them.

Jesus knew God’s goodness, knew the power, reality, and allness of divine Love.

But Jesus never allowed himself to enter that dream. He didn’t subscribe to the common current of thought that man was an imperfect, sinful mortal. Jesus knew God’s goodness, knew the power, reality, and allness of divine Love. He knew that God fathered each one of His children as a spiritual likeness of Himself, completely good. Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Jesus’ true and conscious being never left heaven for earth” (No and Yes, p. 36). Since he wasn’t in the dream, he couldn’t be influenced by it. In biblical terms, Jesus was “walking in the Spirit,” and he was safe.

With this insight I understood that my spiritual identity wasn’t in a dream where elements of creation are in conflict, and where we are helpless victims. My place as God’s spiritual idea was under His law, in His love and care. So I couldn’t actually be in a dangerous environment at risk of being hurt.

I treasured these spiritual ideas—and I trusted them. No new welts appeared, and the existing ones soon disappeared. My yard was again a wonderful place for me to be.

God’s messages change our thought permanently.

The real reward of Christian Science healing is that when we listen to God’s messages, they change our thought permanently. We take steps out of the dream that we can be separated from good. And we’re more likely to challenge the beliefs that we’re merely material beings subject to whatever comes our way.

So when autumn came last year, and I began to exhibit the symptoms of allergies, as I had for several years, I recalled this earlier inspiration from God. It was clear that the whole allergy experience was just another one of those dreams that we’re part of a material creation that’s in conflict. But this time I was certain from the start that I wasn’t in that dream.

I’d learned that divine Love is animating all Her creation. And I was determined to stick to the spiritual facts rather than tolerate the symptoms because they “weren’t serious.” Shortly, the allergy symptoms cleared and haven’t returned, teaching me a profound lesson.

Each time you or I wake up to some aspect of our spiritual reality, the human experience changes. It falls in line with the facts of divine reality. And this is what spiritual healing is all about. It shows us the presence of God in our lives.

Lois Degler lives in Franklin, Tennessee.
This article first appeared on spirituality.com.