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 Healing words--"God's perfect child"

How could a perfect creator let anything slip out of perfection?

SITTING IN MY CAR outside the pharmacy, I wept as I clutched a small bottle filled with Ritalin, a prescription drug for hyperactive children. When our daughter was fourteen months old, we had been referred to a pediatric neurologist, who told us she was "developmentally delayed." Now, she was four, and a pediatrician and a child psychiatrist had diagnosed her as having "hyperactive tendencies and probable attention deficit disorder."

The doctor who had just written this prescription had told my husband and me that she would probably need to continue using this medication throughout adolescence. The idea of giving my daughter these pills for the rest of her childhood was what had made me cry.

As I held that pill bottle in my hand, I remembered something I had learned in the Sunday School I attended as a child. We had been taught that we were all God's perfect children. I had loved that idea. And now, that specific phrase, "God's perfect child," came to mind over and over again as I thought about this problem my daughter was facing. I reasoned that if we were truly perfect as God's children, we could never become imperfect. The perfection God causes must be sustained by Him, incorruptible and eternal. What God causes to be perfect couldn't fall from a state of perfection, even for a split second.

I felt I had a decision to make then and there. Was God a perfect creator? I decided that He must be. And was my daughter God's perfect child? I decided that must also be true-it was the spiritual fact about her identity. Then how could a perfect creator let anything slip out of perfection? He couldn't. I realized that as a perfect child of a perfect God, she was complete and whole right then. Nothing needed to be added to make her whole.

WHEN this little girl was born, God had not pressed a bottle of pills into my hand and told me she'd need them later on. Just the thought of that happening struck me as very funny. This was followed by a deep conviction of the fullness and power of God's care for this child.

This didn't come to me as an argument or a debate; it was more like a powerful revelation of something I'd always known but was just now beginning to understand. With all the longing of a mother's love, I wanted to prove that this was the unconditional truth about my sweet little daughter. I wanted to bear witness to the practical application of this spiritual law. The pills ended up on the windowsill over our kitchen sink. And there they stayed for some time.

Those three words-"God's perfect child"-stayed with me. And the memory of that spiritual insight outside the drugstore frequently renewed my faltering faith. I was gaining a calm confidence that everything was going to be all right.

A few weeks later, we made two important decisions. We had been told that our daughter would probably be placed in special "learning disabled" classes in school. As a result, we were impelled to visit a small Christian school in our community. In that school, we met wonderful and devoted teachers, and felt a palpable presence of love. We placed our daughter in kindergarten there.

Also, my mother-in-law suggested that our little girl take up piano lessons, and she offered to pay for them. We found a perfect music teacher, who dearly loved our daughter.

As the months went by, our daughter's behavior improved steadily, and at some point, the unopened pill bottle was tossed in the trash.

A FEW WEEKS LATER I decided I wanted to learn more about God and to understand more about what it meant to be His perfect child. I began reading the Bible and a book that explained God in a revolutionary way-Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. I had read both of these books in the Christian Science Sunday School, but had fallen away from the teaching in my late teens.

After reading the New Testament and all of Science and Health, I decided to read Miscellaneous Writings and other works by Mary Baker Eddy. In one of those works, Rudimental Divine Science, I found this statement: "The spiritual power of a scientific, right thought, without a direct effort, an audible or even a mental argument, has oftentimes healed inveterate diseases."1

I realized then that a "scientific, right thought"-in this case, my daughter's perfection as a child of God-had brought about the healing. She made swift academic progress, skipping third grade and moving forward to an advanced fourth-grade class.

As I dug deeper into the Bible and Mrs. Eddy's writings, other long-term problems with this daughter were also healed. She had frequently suffered from allergies and allergic reactions to a variety of foods and substances, but these troubles diminished and eventually disappeared as my understanding of God grew.

Throughout junior high and high school, she maintained an impressive grade-point average, frequently in accelerated courses. She is now a college student and an accomplished musician. The physical and developmental difficulties associated with those early years are completely gone.

Science and Health tells us, "Truth has a healing effect, even when not fully understood."2 I must admit, I still don't understand the fullness of that powerful truth-that each one of us is the perfect child of God-but I learn a little more about its healing power and practical application each day, and it continues to bless my life.

1 Rud., p. 9.

2 Science and Health, p. 152.

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