Disabilities need not be permanent
MANY government and insurance forms require an individual to certify that he is permanently disabled in order to receive certain benefits. While this process may be temporarily necessary under some circumstances, no one need consent in his heart to permanent disability. Why can one resist the label ``permanently disabled''? Because Christ Jesus and many of his followers have proved that no disability is truly permanent. Jesus healed a man who had been blind all his life (see John 9:1-7). He restored a child stricken with a severe mental disorder (see Luke 9:38-42). He cured one who could neither speak nor see (see Matthew 12:22). He healed a man who had been crippled for thirty-eight years, and the man walked freely (see John 5:5-9). The Apostle Paul healed a man who had been a cripple since his birth (see Acts 14:8-10).
Yet the sufferer naturally wonders: ``Where is God's healing love today? Aren't such victories confined to ancient times?''
Verified healings of serious disabilities have been reported in current issues of The Christian Science Journal and the Christian Science Sentinel. These periodicals are available at Christian Science Reading Rooms located in cities and towns throughout the world. These healings, even though modest in number, point to the fact that God's healing love is still very much available.
Recognizing the power and nearness of divine Love helps one begin to challenge feelings of helplessness and discouragement that sometimes accompany disability.
One can begin his quest for healing by establishing a basis for confidence. Christian Science gives one this basis. It shows, in harmony with the Bible, the true nature of God's creation as ``very good,'' 1 and assures us that God is caus- ing only uprightness and harmony. This Science teaches that fleshly evidence is temporal, changeable, and therefore not to be accepted as final or irreversible.
This is not to say that God is forming man with a perfect mortal body. God, who is Spirit, has made man spiritual and complete. As we come to understand this through prayer and spiritualization of thought--through expressing more of the purity of our actual selfhood--we gain an increasing measure of dominion over the body. The New Testament describes God as ``him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.'' 2
God is causing His children to be ``faultless,'' not fear-filled. God is providing His offspring with ability, not disability. God is permanently authoring freedom, not bondage. The Apostle Paul affirms, ``God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.'' 3
Through consecrated study of Christian Science, which includes deep and persistent prayer, one can discover the permanent nature of God's care for man. Practicing Christian Science leads one to accept Spirit, God, as the one and only lawgiver, and thereby to resist the unjust claims of materialism. Supposed material laws that would seem to validate disability cannot overpower the spiritual law of God and of man's God-given wholeness.
In her answer to the question ``How is the healing done in Christian Science?'' Mary Baker Eddy4 writes: ``It is Christ come to destroy the power of the flesh; it is Truth over error; that understood, gives man ability to rise above the evidence of the senses, take hold of the eternal energies of Truth, and destroy mortal discord with immortal harmony,--the grand verities of being.'' 5
Christian Science offers the sufferer a sound basis for confronting and defeating disability. Since God has formed man with permanent ability to express strength and wholeness, we need not bow down to fleshly limitations.
In the proportion that we embrace the reality that God is the only creator, we find disabilities yielding. As we cleave to the understanding of our God-given identity and learn to distrust the unreliable evidence that would contradict man's spiritual perfection, our God-provided dominion will become more evident.
1 See Genesis 1:31. 2 Jude 1:24. 3 II Corinthians 9:8. 4 The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. 5 Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 96-97. DAILY BIBLE VERSE The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me.
Psalms 138:8
