Is Sickness Real? How to Stop Living in Fear of It
Fear turns a symptom into a verdict, and this week's Bible Lesson wants to know who appointed the judge.
The title is "Are Sin, Disease, and Death Real?" I know. Nothing says cozy October like it. Stay anyway, because the answer gets practical fast.
Science and Health has a short story that does more work than most sermons. Mary Baker Eddy describes a woman in convulsions who believed she had a chronic liver complaint. One minute she spoke despairingly of herself. The next she said, "My food is all digested, and I should like something more to eat." Eddy says it took a few minutes. That has to be the politest recovery in recorded history.
The lesson sets that story beside one of her plainest lines on how this works: when a false belief gets corrected, "Truth sends a report of health over the body." Yes, I hear how that sounds. Psalm 3 quotes the crowd telling the psalmist there's no help for him in God, and the lesson prints that verse twice, which I read as permission to bring your own version of that voice to the table. Eddy calls reason the most active human faculty, so bring that too.
Section 1 supplies the definition everything else leans on: darkness is "only a mortal sense of the absence of light." Nobody has ever bailed darkness out of a basement with a bucket. Somebody flips a switch, and the darkness never gets to argue its case. Eddy puts every item in this week's title in that same category, the supposed absence of Life, which she calls God. Elsewhere she says it flat: "Life has no partnership with death." So the voice narrating your worst-case scenario has no standing.
Here's where I'll plant a flag. Eddy says to fear sin is to doubt God's government and distrust His omnipotent care. Swap in sickness and the logic holds: every flinch hands the symptom more authority than it ever earned.
Her fix goes further than "try not to be afraid," which has never worked on anyone. She says to hold yourself superior to it, because God made you superior to it. The passage is headed "Superiority to sickness and sin," and you can read that without feeling smug. Nobody earned that standing, so nobody has to defend it.
Section 5 takes on the hardest case. A widow's only son is being carried out through the town gate, and before Jesus does anything else, he tells her, "Do not weep." Then the young man sits up and starts talking. Eddy calls death "another phase of the dream that existence can be material." You can hold that at arm's length or lean in. I lean in.
The lesson ends on Eddy's line "Work out your own salvation," which she calls the demand of Life and Love because God works with you to that end. Earlier she says the nothingness of error has to be demonstrated, which I take as an honest admission that this gets tested in real life, with help.
So test it. When a symptom or a grudge shows up this week, catch the first sentence your mind writes about it and read it back like a stranger's text message. Would Love have sent that? If the answer is no, you've found the belief worth working on.
We're digging into all of it Sunday, October 11, in person and on Zoom. Bring the doubt. What was the first sentence your mind wrote this morning?
