The other night when I got home, my cat Turbo happened to walk around me in such a way that I noticed something stuck on her little behind. It was a tick. While a flood of material methods came to thought, suggesting ways to be rid of it, a quiet, more calm thought told me that I could handle the situation through prayer in Christian Science.
What came to thought first was a reminder of something I'd already demonstrated. Several years ago, my cat and my sister's both had a case of fleas. As I prayed about it, I saw that the concept of a parasite--something that has to steal its sustenance from something else--just didn't make sense in God's perfect, good creation (see Genesis 1:31). Since then, my cat hasn't had fleas, despite spending much of her time outside, and becoming friends with a stray cat whom I've named Percy Jackson. I even reasoned that it was much more likely that Percy Jackson would catch flealessness from Turbo, than that she would catch fleas from him, since now my thought was resting on him, too. But back to the tick...
So, I knew it wasn't the false concept of parasitism that needed handling. That was done. Then it occurred to me--I truly was, as a Christian Science practitioner, working with thought. So, just as with any case, I realized that I couldn't and shouldn't be praying to fix matter. Instead of praying to get rid of a tick, I was praying to understand something more about God's creation, about its perfection--just whatever it was that was truly going on in God's universe.
I remembered that a day or so before I had been listening to some Christian Science audio recordings. In one of them, I heard the familiar idea that we find the truth by reversing error; in other words, a mistake always indicates its opposite--what's correct, what's true. Applying that to the concept of a parasite-tick, something just clicked in thought: if what most people would see was a nasty parasite [the error], then if a tick were really real, it would have to be something really neat [the truth]! It wouldn't have any of the negative qualities we tend to associate with a tick. It would be something "very good," as God declared in Genesis. I didn't take time to contemplate it any further. Thought seemed satisfied at knowing that it was good.
So, I let my cat out for the night and went to bed. When I let her in the next morning, I had almost forgotten about what I'd seen the night before, but when I remembered, I checked where the tick had been, and found that it was gone.
Thinking back on it, I realized that this incident wasn't really about helping my cat. She hadn't seemed bothered at all by the tick. It was really about me having the opportunity to demonstrate God's law. Kind of like when Jesus healed a blind man, as recorded in John's gospel. He said that the opportunity to heal presented itself so that "the works of God should be made manifest" (see John 9:1-7).
And just like when Jesus healed, this process didn't really take time. From the moment I stopped considering material means of tick removal, and mentally committed to prayer, all the helpful ideas just flooded in. Seriously, the process took under five minutes. Why so quick? Because it was natural! God's law is always operating. And experiencing it in even the tiniest details of our lives is about the most natural thing there is. Amen!
