Spiders and their webs

Two weeks ago, I came into my office one morning and a large spider web had appeared over night between the legs of a table I have sitting in front of my window.

I wiped the web away and proceeded with my day.

The next morning, I came into my office, and another large web spanned the same two legs of that table.

I swiped it away with a cloth and proceeded with my day.

As I sat at my desk, though, looking at the clean legs of that table, I realized the mesh was going to appear again the next day if I didn’t remove the critter that weaved the construct in the first place. Webs don’t appear by themselves! I reminded myself.

So, I hunted down the eight-legged creature responsible for the web and shooed him out the door.

Ta da!

There have been no more webs since then.

Then I pondered the relevance of this lesson to spiritual healing.

As a metaphor, I decided the web was like symptoms on the body, and the spider was the mortal mind belief producing the symptoms on the body. If one focuses only on removing symptoms, either with a medicine, a surgery, or through human will power, there may be temporary relief, but the problem recurs until the underlying error in thought has been destroyed.

I remember a time when our daughter was around 4 years old. One day, she was complaining about pain in her legs. I prayed with her. No relief. When I tucked her in at night, we talked some more about healing the pain, and she mentioned something about riding a horse recently. I quizzed her some more, and she said that her legs hurt because they got stretched too wide straddling the horse she had ridden.

I suddenly saw that in her mind, her legs hurt because of straddling the horse, and until we removed that belief from her thought, she was holding a justification for suffering in her mind, and the pain would continue until that belief was removed.

So I targeted the “spider”—or belief—at work behind the scenes causing the outward suffering. We talked about how riding that horse was fun and no harm could come from it, even if our legs got stretched different than normal. She happily agreed, quickly fell asleep, and that was the end of the pain.

So, the moral of the story is, if you don’t want anymore webs of error woven in a particular area of your life, eliminate the critter behind the scenes weaving the maze in the first place. It’s a lot easier that way because you don’t have to keep repeating your work.

Watch thought, not effect

Last Friday, while practicing my tennis strokes with a ball machine, I learned a valuable lesson about watching thoughts and knowing what the effect of those thoughts would be without checking outward evidence.

Let me explain.

During one stroke exercise, I disciplined myself to watch the ball to my racket while I followed through with the appropriate swing. Then, without looking, I would guess where my ball would land at the other end of the court, based upon how I hit the ball. I was amazed how accurate my guesses were. By closely watching my expectations and execution I could guess within 2-4 feet where my ball would land almost every time, without looking first.

This lesson had huge metaphysical implications. It taught me that if you are very aware of your thoughts and expectations, you’ll be very aware of any resulting effect, for every thought has a specific effect.

When praying for physical healing, have you ever checked your body to see if your prayer is working?

Why?

Per my lesson with tennis strokes, you can tell exactly how well your prayer is working by examining your thoughts and expectations. You don’t need to check the body. You can tell “where the ball will land” without looking, because every thought has a certain kind of effect. You can tell what you’ll find on the body by examining your thoughts about the body, because those thoughts determine what you’re going to find.

If we feel a need to check the body to see how we’re doing, chances are strong that we’re still believing we have a problem. Why else would we check unless we doubted our perfection? And the very belief that we have a problem is much of the problem in the first place.

With my tennis strokes, I have this terrible habit of looking across the court to see where my ball will land before I hit it. It causes me to miss hit frequently. Once I realized I didn’t need to look “out there,” but could stay focused on hitting the ball only, my miss hits started to vanish. My accuracy skyrocketed.

Likewise, this rule applies in prayer. If we spend all our time checking the body to see if we’re okay or not, we’re not doing our job of praying correctly in the first place. If we’d stay focused on knowing the Truth that heals us, instead of checking the body, we’d advance more rapidly. Once we get the right thoughts in firm view, the right effect will follow.

So, I learned from this little episdoe that we can quit looking across the court to see where our ball is going to land, and concentrate on hitting the ball correctly. If we hit the ball correctly, the ball will land in the right spot. If we hold to the pertinent spiritual truths, the body will correspond exactly to those spiritual truths. We don’t need to check to see what is happening. We’ll know what is happening by watching our thoughts and expectations.

A metaphysical tennis lesson for the day… :-)

Mind, not matter, is causation. A material body only expresses a material and mortal mind. A mortal man possesses this body, and he makes it harmonious or discordant according to the images of thought impressed upon it. You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness. You should banish all thoughts of disease and sin and of other beliefs included in matter. Man, being immortal, has a perfect indestructible life. It is the mortal belief which makes the body discordant and diseased in proportion as ignorance, fear, or human will governs
mortals. Mary Baker Eddy