A lot has happened.  Well, not a lot of events, but I feel different.  Last year at this time I was praying about just getting to Association.  I’m very grateful for the healing at that time.  I sent in my gratitude for it a while ago, but it’s taken a bit longer to recognize some of the larger lessons from the experience.

What has happened is that, after such an aggressive sense that I was being stopped, I started thinking about going forward and whether that was feasible.  Most of my siblings and my classmates from school are retired or talking about retiring soon.  But I’ve once again been given a new way to think of myself.  I have been shown something of Science and it seems as though there’s a reason for that. 

It’s not that I’m full of certainty and feeling like Onward Christian Soldiers.  I’m more sobered by the needs of the mankind that I see, and the self-sacrifice and consecration and courage required to help.  What I’m seeing more clearly that helps me go forward, is the fact of God.

During the healing last year I was particularly struck by the passage in Science and Health, by Mrs. Eddy, that includes this:  “A correct view of Christian Science and of its adaptation to healing includes vastly more than is at first seen.  Works on metaphysics leave the grand point untouched. They never crown the power of Mind as the Messiah,…”  (p. 116)

And there’s this passage from Mrs. Eddy’s unpublished writings:

     “How many Christian Scientists give treatments as though they knew that Mind really heals the sick?  The real thing is the presence of Mind and the realization that there is no other presence.  Do not be afraid to take this stand and demonstrate it.  Make God All, for God is All, and there is nothing else.  It is just as though Mind were saying:  ‘I am here, and there is nothing else here.  I am the practitioner and I am the patient and there is nothing else and neither can be, other than I AM.’”

I have wondered at times why I seem to learn so slowly, or have been so reluctant to give more completely.  But slow or fast, it doesn’t seem right to turn aside now.  It strikes me as a matter of conscience – the definite need to stand and act on what I love. 

There have been waves of darkness rolling in as well that try to make going forward seem incredibly bleak and foolhardy.  Or sometimes I find that I’m trying to pray in a buzz of low-level fear.  When these times come, I’m learning to stop and pray for myself again.  This isn’t always a long arduous prayer-session, but waking up, turning again to the reality of light and good and Love, and also loving and feeling great gratitude for the Allness of God. 

And practice has changed – the kind of cases and the decisiveness of healings.