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The apostle Paul tells us, "We have the
mind of Christ" (I Cot 2:16). We do not have to be dominated by the carnal
mind, which is "enmity against God," is full of mistakes and fears and errors,
bul instead we can put on that consciousness of truth that is "the mind of
Christ." It is this that enables us to be "transformed by the renewing of [our]
mind" (Rom 12:2).
We have a friend who is a professional
nurse and she worked in a hospital where there were a great number of paralysis
cases. This sight of paralysed patients presented before her eyes, mormng,
noorn and night began to affect her own body; it began to seize up. The
specialist she worked for told her he thought she had the symptoms of a
paralysing disease. She accepted this verdict and steadily got more and more
locked up until she had to give up her nursing.At about the same time her
husband changed his job and they moved. In the new area they came under a
different local general practitioner. This man said, 'I think it is possible
that you may be labouring under a false diagnosis. If you see a different
specialist he may have quite another view of it.' She agreed. When she saw the
new specialist he said, 'I do not believe you have what you thought you had; I
think it is all in the mind. But you have so convinced yourself that you have
the disease that your body is physically locked up. We will take you into
hospital for a few days, put you under anaesthetic, and loosen your frozen
limbs forcibly. But you will be all right.' This was what happened, and she was
all right; she is totally released and she is an active, physically-free woman,
still in the nursing world.
That is obviously not a spiritual
healing, but you could call it a mental healing. She made the step from the
physical to the mental, It was a vivid example, and valuable for her in
nursing, to see the power of one's own mind over one's own body for ill or for
good.
Mind is the power.
When you look at such a thing in the
light of Christian Science, you realize Mind is the power, but it is not just
the human mind, mind with a small m, it is not me thinking a strong thought for
or against. The Mind that governs me is the Mind of God. We learn to understand
that God is the Mind of the universe, God is the Mind of man. It is like the
electric current running through your house circuit: it is always there but we
have to plug into it to receive the power. So Mind-power acts with authority,
with law. It gives us freedom and dominion, it opens the mental windows, and it
shows us new possibilities that we never dreamed of before. If we change from
mind to Mind - the Mind which is God - it suddenly releases the limits of our
own thinking and doors open for us. Our mind is renewed, transformed in fact,
and we experience what Paul meant when he said "We have the mind [Mind] of
Christ."
Many years ago a woman came to us who had
hammer toes, all curled up. The surgeon had said that he would cut the
ligaments of her toes to flatten them out. She thought, Do I have to? In the
meantime she came along to see us. I said to her, 'Tell me about yourself.'
'Oh,' she said, 'It's my mother.' I said, 'Say that again.' She repeated, 'It's
my mother.' Her hands and toes curled up at the mention of mother, who she said
was very domineering. Whether she was or not I do not know, but that was her
belief, so it affected her as if it were true. We talked about how, under God,
each one of us is free whether we accept an impediment, as she regarded her
mother, or whether we do not accept it. Each one of us is like a sunbeam coming
direct from our divine source. No two sunbeams cross over each other or
interfere with each other, or are parted from their source.Each one of us is
directly God-governed, God-directed, God-informed. As we talked along those
lines she caught the idea. She went back home and her toes opened out perfectly
naturally and she never needed to have that operation. She had changed the
basis of her thought, accepting the Mind that is God, and "that Mind governs
the body, not partially but wholly" (S&H 111:28).
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