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