The healing of hurt

We've all had our little hurts. The time we were snubbed; the unkind remark; the callous attitude. But these pass, just as little physical hurts are left behind - the stubbed toe, the hangnail.

It's the big hurts, the deep mental or physical scars, that can feel overpowering or seem permanently rooted in our life. But they are notm overpowering. They can be uprooted and destroyed. The answers to some problems in life go undiscovered because those answers are so different from what people expect. So it may be with the solution to hurt. The answer is that you cannot be hurtm.

But how is that an answer to the person who has suffered through some of the horrors of war, of Vietnam or Lebanon or Afghanistan? And what relevance does it have for the person in an inner city (or quiet suburb) who has been devastated by physical or verbal or mental abuse? To the unillumined material sense of things, the statement that you cannot be hurt is at least naive. And yet, to the spiritually enlightened and receptive thought, profound truth underlies these words.

Christ Jesus, more than any other person in history, understood and demonstrated truth. He saw far more deeply into reality than we do. He looked beyond surface physicality and discerned man's true nature, the pure likeness of divine Spirit. He perceived man's inherent perfection so vividly that concepts of imperfection fell away. Illness, immorality, and even death itself retreated in the face of his clear recognition that man, as God's beloved child, cannot be hurt.

Remember the Gadarene? He was the man in the Bible who seemed so desperate, hurting mentally and physically. ''And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.'' n1 The gentle power of the Christ lifted from that man the awful feelings of hurt. He was healed; he discovered something of his God-given peace and security. He was saved because the Christ, the true idea of God so fully expressed by Jesus, revealed to him that God's child could not be hurt.

n1 Mark 5:5.

This same Christ is speaking to you today. The material senses may scream their reasons why man should feel tortured, but the tenderness of the Christ resides within consciousness, whispering to you the same message that was given to the early disciples: ''Nothing shall by any means hurt you.'' n2

n2 Luke 10:9.

True, the message may not make much sense to the mortal view that is willing to admit only what the corporeal senses see and feel and hear. But the urgings of the Christ silence physical sense and give us hope and courage even during those times when it appears that others would consciously try to harm us. An honest desire to stay close to the Christ, to live rightly and love purely, will serve as an impenetrable shield. The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science , Mary Baker Eddy, wrote out of solid experience. She assures those who love the Christ, ''If one lives rightly, every effort to hurt one will only help that one; for God will give the ability to overcome whatever tends to impede progress.'' n3

n3 Miscellaneous Writings, p. 115.

If various conditions of human existence would claim to injure us, we can turn to the Master's assurance that nothing shall hurt us. This was more than a hopeful human promise. It carried, and still carries, the authority and power of the Christ, Truth. His statement was the utterance of divine law.

Human hurt is not law; it is a concept, an awful concept, of limited human thinking. The saving presence of the Christ can surface in our life today, waking us to the realization that divine law can never be overturned. Then the hurt dissolves. It loses its large-scale appearance of reality, and we discover that genuine Truth is infinitely good, never evil.

As we find the humility to admit that God's man, our true spiritual identity, is never hurt, a Christly peace comes to us, and we feel a deep and grateful conviction that God's care for us has always been inviolable. DAILY BIBLE VERSE The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. Psalms 121:7, 8