So many of you have written in about or mentioned to me the posting I wrote June 18th called A Child Healed.  Some have expressed wonder, some gratitude, still others a deep appreciation for the spiritual understanding of my mother.

I was a most fortunate child.  I never went to a doctor.  I never took any medicine.  I never had to.  My mother’s ability to use the power of God’s love made the necessity of these material remedies unnecessary.  She was always quick to heal my older brother and me.

My father did not share our belief system, but he recognized my mom’s abilities to heal and let her do it her way.  He stayed out of the way and let her do God’s work.  Some of you will call these miracles.  Some of you know that these experiences of healing were just everyday natural occurrences for my mom.

At the age of around 12, I came down with a wicked case of swimmer’s ear.  We lived a block from the country club, and in the summer, my brother, Jim, and I spent just about 24/7 in the pool.  We got out of the water for a few meals and a little sleep, but that was about it.

To this day I’m not really sure what swimmer’s ear is (probably some sort of inner ear infection), but I know I had it, having gotten it before.  It wasn’t fun and this particular time was the worst.  It felt like someone had taken a 6” long needle and run it through my ear into my brain and just left it there.

I was miserable, lying in Mom’s bed moaning and crying and sometimes screaming from the pain.  Mom had moved me into her bed where she could better watch over me.  She sat at the side of the bed and read the truths from the Bible to me over and over as I carried on.  I waited for the pain to go away, but it would not cease, driving me to exhaustion.

Finally Mom grew silent and paced through the room deep in thought.  I continued to suffer dramatically.  Suddenly she turned on me and, questioning loudly, asked, “Who do you hate?”  I sat up in bed out of my hysterics and said, “Wha?”  She repeated it again. “Who do you hate?”

I had no idea, but in these moments you didn’t fight Mom, you answered her.  I thought through my friends, my family, and was coming up with no one when suddenly my next door neighbor, Mrs. M, seared through my already searing brain.

I blurted, “Mrs. M.  I hate Mrs. M!”

Mrs. M was my nemesis.  At the time I was too young to understand, but now, looking back, I know that Mrs. M was jealous of our family and often took it out on me in subtle, but smarmy ways.  She was clever enough to look innocent to the adults and I was young enough to miss the subtleties of her sometimes nasty intentions.  She was a confusing presence in my life — gushing in her shallow affections and wicked in her backstabbing intentions.

Mom had uncovered the error, the mistake that was the cause of the disease.  She wasn’t trying to heal the disease; she was trying to uncover the mental cause of the disease.  With this one tough question she had done so.  It was hatred.  I didn’t know it, but she did.

Recently Mrs. M had caught me doing some trivial childhood prank and had said to me, “If you rake my garden, I won’t tell your parents.”  Not only did I rake her garden, but I also dug up around the bushes and generally went way beyond the agreement to insure her silence.  Then she ratted on me to my parents anyway.  That was Mrs. M.

So I had carried that hurt forward in the form of hatred – probably without even knowing it.

At that point Mom said, “Let’s look at all the good things about Mrs. M.”  This was not a particularly attractive idea for me at the time, but again, in those moments, you didn’t fight Mom.

We sat for about 20 minutes and counted the good qualities of Mrs. M (of which there were many).  At first I was somewhat reluctant, but after a while I got into it and soon we were laughing and loving and seeing this lady in all her beauty.

Of course, in the process of dropping the hatred, I forgot about my ear.  After the 20 minutes of seeing the good of Mrs. M, my ear problem was completely healed.  I had no pain, no after effects, and no recurrence of the problem – ever.  I never had the problem again.  I was completely healed.  Even Mrs. M cleaned up her act.

Later that afternoon I wanted to go swimming, but knew that Mom would say ‘no’ because the difficulty had been so intense.  She surprised me by saying, “Go ahead.”  She understood that the healing was complete and that it wasn’t the pool or something in the water that had caused the problem.  It was the hatred that had caused the problem.  The hatred had been healed, the cause had disappeared and so there was no longer any ill effect.

Mom had it down.  She was a natural healer.  She understood the science of healing, that the cause of any disease or problem whatever it is, was mental.  She didn’t heal the disease; she healed the mental cause.  She knew that the first step of any healing was to identify the problem, the cause.  That process often took the most time.  Once the real cause was discovered, the healing always took place immediately because she would negate the cause and replace it with the truth.  Once that was complete, the healing was complete.

Sounds easy.  And sometimes it is.  And sometimes we struggle through trying to figure it all out.  It’s a way of life and I’m glad I learned it from one of the best.  It’s been a huge and constant blessing in my life – the ability to heal.

Where is God in all this, you might ask?  Right smack in the center and circumference.  God supplies the process, the ideas, the goodness, the power and we work the science.  The science of healing works.  We just have to learn to work it.