It was the oddest experience I’ve had in a long time.

Two nights ago, I looked at a part of my body and blinked twice, because conditions didn’t look normal. I thought, “No, this can’t be.” I blinked again, and the situation just wasn’t right.

Horrible images of what might be wrong started erupting in thought.

“You have a disease!” Mortal mind was yelling loud.

In my healing ministry, I hear dozens of descriptions of disease every week, often associated with names people dread. It is my practice to remain unimpressed and immediately know the spiritual truth about the person voicing the error. This has not been hard for me to do.

At this moment, though, descriptions of a particular disease I had heard about many times from patients came to the fore, and I started wondering if I had it.

This type of thinking was so Not Me! But nonetheless, it was happening.

Fear was knocking hard at my mental door.

It was time to go to bed, so I went to the bedroom, but I did not go to sleep. I vigorously defended myself from these very aggressive suggestions. And that is exactly how I viewed the situation—as aggressive suggestion.

The condition looked very physical, but Christian Science had taught me to view physical conditions as suggestions only, never as fact.

If one thinks a problem is physical, he or she might lose hope, because it’s sometimes hard to see how prayer can change a physical condition. But if one sees the condition as suggestion, logic follows that suggestions can be rebutted, denied and silenced.

It took me several hours of vehement and constant rebuttal to silence the error and quiet the fear. But eventually, the voice of error died down, the suggestion disappeared and I fell asleep in peace.

When I awoke in the morning, it wasn’t until later that I remembered the struggle I had gone through the night before. There was no more evidence of a problem. I was fine.

From this experience, I can see how one symptom can lead to another if a person let’s their imagination run wild with fear. Thought will start to outline its growing fears on the body. But, thanks to Christian Science, these symptoms can be checked and prevented from growing into something worse. Or, if they seem to have grown worse, they can still be checked, for every condition, no matter how physical it appears, is still suggestion. It’s never reality.

“Exclude from mortal mind the offending errors; then the body cannot suffer from them.” Mary Baker Eddy

I’m grateful for the quick moving through this experience to a right outcome. It reinforces what I’ve learned over the years that denial of a lie, affirmation of Truth, and sticking to our arguments of Truth until the error fades, works.