The Christian Science Journal has brought health and spirituality into the lives of individuals and families since 1883. Instructive articles and verified reports of Christian healing give the reader a working understanding of the divine Principle and practice of Christian Science. Each monthly issue also contains a worldwide directory of Christian Science practitioners, teachers, churches, Reading Rooms, organizations at universities and colleges, nurses, and Committees on Publication serving the public. 

Free Issue

Reports of Healing

Upcoming Features

Subscribe On-Line

Give a Gift Subscription

Customer Service

THE EDITORS' PAGES 

A way to help with AIDS in Africa

"The number one problem in the world today." That’s the way Richard Holbrooke, United States ambassador to the United Nations, describes the spread of AIDS, especially in Africa.

The impact on children alone is staggering. An estimated 11 million are orphans, and many schools are without teachers, because of the disease. Substantial efforts are being made to educate people about preventive measures and to end tolerance of destructive sexual behavior. But poverty, war, ignorance, and corruption are obstacles to progress. Some organizations are already looking ahead to the prospect of coping with massive populations who have grown up without adult supervision. Carol Bellamy, the executive director of UNICEF, calls for "the largest mobilization of resources in history" to meet these challenges.

People of all faiths who believe in a transcendent spiritual power are very much needed in this mobilization. The world’s greatest resource is prayer. Prayer brings to light the intelligent love that governs the universe. Coming to know the love of God has transformed the lives of millions. It has brought healing to minds and also to bodies.

Anywhere on earth, anyone who accepts that God’s love is a present and active power is helping to lessen the world’s fear that disease is unstoppable. Each prayer acknowledging that God is Love itself is helping to put an end to the awful mistake that disease is some kind of divine punishment. The correction of misconceptions like these is actually fundamental to curing sickness, because thought influences body. And collective thought influences the health of the world’s people. Our understanding of what controls life makes a difference to us individually and to the world. Our concept of God matters.

To understand that God is the wholly loving Mind governing creation empowers prayer. God doesn’t create anything harmful. He doesn’t design a self-destroying creation. God’s substance and ours is spiritual and indestructible. The creator loves and preserves each individual identity.

Even moments of affirming spiritual realities like these can be concept-changing prayers for a world reconciled to living with AIDS for years to come. And prayer also helps the world outgrow attitudes that tend to hide God’s healing love—feelings of condemnation, indifference, and belief in incurability. There is so much to learn from Jesus in this regard. Because he didn’t hold attitudes like these, God’s unconditional love shone through him and healed multitudes.

Jesus didn’t condemn the people he healed. But he did condemn oppression and brutality, and these behaviors, which contribute to the AIDS crisis today, should be condemned by the world community. People who dominate and abuse others can learn a better life. They and their victims have the right to know the priceless worth of each of God’s daughters and sons. Our prayers can help. Only divine Love can heal the desperation and insecurity, the fear and hardness, that impel abusive behavior.

We see this healing action again and again in Jesus’ acts—a dishonest tax collector, an adulterous woman, a man who cut himself with chains, each transformed by the love of Christ.

Then there was the twelve-year-old girl who was dying. Her father, Jairus, appealed to Jesus to come and heal her. Luke’s Gospel says she was Jairus’s "one only daughter." 1 She was loved. Precious.

The appeal didn’t come at an idle moment for Jesus. He was surrounded by a crowd of people with pressing needs of their own. But his immediate response to a distraught father shows how natural it is to care even for someone we don’t know. After all, we do know that every person in the world has the hopes, yearnings, and feelings we have. Still more, each one is the deeply loved and uniquely valued child of the divine Mother-Father God. We naturally inherit God’s love for all creation. And this love motivates us to pray for the eradication of disease wherever it occurs.

Before Jesus got to Jairus’s house, the precious daughter had already been pronounced dead. She was surrounded by people who believed that there was no hope. The same belief surrounds millions in Africa today. But Jesus must have known without a doubt that this child depended solely on God for her life. If God gives life, what power can contradict His will? Didn’t Jesus come to show that God-defying forces are bogus, and that the Spirit which animated him was a resurrecting power for minds and bodies? Referring to the immense implications of his own resurrection, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, "Jesus’ deed was for the enlightenment of men and for the salvation of the whole world from sin, sickness, and death." 2

Prayer lit by the example of Jesus’ victory over death can resurrect the hopes of the world regarding the AIDS crisis. And individual examples of courage in the face of tremendous odds can inspire us not to be overwhelmed by its magnitude.

The hope and courage of a fifteen-year-old Eritrean girl is one such example. She was "born in the field," as she puts it, while her parents were fighting in the war for Eritrean independence. When she was 12, Ethiopian soldiers took her parents away. She hasn’t seen them since 1997. Now living with relatives in the United States, she says that learning to pray has helped her to keep her hope.

"Now I understand that God is my Father and Mother, always with me, and that nothing can hurt me," she told me. "When I say the Lord’s Prayer, I know that God is always with everyone, protecting them." When she gets discouraged, she thinks of a verse from the Bible that says "God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." 3 She feels that God guided her to safety, and she wants to return to Eritrea after she gets an education, to help teach others and work for the development of her country.

Her story inspires faith that there is a divine Parent on the scene for every man, woman, and child in Africa. This tender, guiding Mind can lead anyone affected by AIDS to the knowledge he or she needs in order to be free. And our prayers will help these precious daughters and sons find the healing they deserve.

Margaret Rogers
Associate Editor

1 See Luke 8:42.
2 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 45.
3 II Tim. 1:7.

To read the full edition of The Christian Science Journal, go to any Christian Science Reading Room, or click on the buttons below to subscribe or to get your FREE ISSUE.

Featured Articles from previous issues of The Christian Science Journal

The flame still burning by Caryl Emra Farkas from the December 2000 issue of the Journal.

Thanksgiving - a natural response by Mark Swinney from the November 2000 issue of the Journal.

Health and Freedom - everybody's right by Marta Greenwood from the October 2000 issue of the Journal.

Healing words--"God's perfect child" by Rosemary Fuller Thornton from the September 2000 issue of the Journal.

Discovering Science and Health and Its Author by Constance L. Pierce from the August 2000 issue of the Journal.

Ecology and spirituality by Glen Lauder from the July 2000 issue of the Journal.

The Christlike basis for healing by David E. Sleeper from the June 2000 issue of the Journal.

Heading True Northby Kim Shippey from the May 2000 issue of the Journal.

Nurture children through seeing what the Father does by Channing Walker from the April 2000 issue of the Journal.

Healing the "Incurable" by Janet Heiniman Clements from the March 2000 issue of the Journal.

Abolishing mental slavery by Nathan A. Talbot from the February 2000 issue of the Journal.

Spiritual momentum and the unfolding good of the true millennium by William E. Moody from the January 2000 issue of the Journal.

More
Articles