How religious faith can make you almost INVULNERABLE to disease.
Magazine Reprint
After suffering from depression most of her life, Christine found herself, an atheist, asking for a sign from God. “I need to know I’m not alone,” she whispered in her despair. “Is there anybody there?” At the time, she was sitting at the desk of her second floor office. Suddenly, something at the window caught her eye. It was a monarch butterfly, its black and orange wings glowing phosphorescently in the morning sun. It fluttered at her window for a few minutes, then flew off.
“I decided to take that as a “yes,’” says Christine. “I didn’t believe for a minute that it was a coincidence. In the nine years I’d been in that office, that was the first–and last–butterfly I ever saw at my window.” And it was also the last day that Christine suffered from depression. What years of therapy and antidepressants couldn’t cure, faith did.
Christine’s sudden recovery once would have been scoffed at by doctors as just another manifestation of her neurosis. But today, they’re most likely to take notice.
Christine’s cure would come as no surprise to a director of religion, spirituality, and health at a leading university medical center. In his recent study of 87 seriously depressed men and women, he found that those who put spirituality at the center of their lives recovered 70 percent faster than those who didn’t, and the more spiritually centered an individual was, the faster he or she healed.
A second study, involving 1,700 people over the age of 65, compared immune system factors in those who attended religious services with those who didn’t. The director and his colleagues found that those who went to services — even if they went just once a month — had significantly stronger immune systems.
Twenty years ago, this doctor couldn’t pay scientific audiences to listen to him talk about connections between spirituality and health. But today he’s in such demand as a speaker that he shuttles from coast to coast with barely enough time to change his shirt.
One of the greatest healing factors is faith
Your physical state of health is definitely dependent on your emotional state of health, and your emotional health is largely dependent on your spiritual condition. In fact, some doctors estimate that emotional causes contribute to as much as 90 percent of all illnesses.
Fear, tension, and hatred all produce various psychological and nervous diseases. Many physiological diseases like heart trouble, arthritis, and stomach ulcers can also be caused by worry, fear, bitterness, hatred, or a negative attitude toward life. Science has proven that all of these negative attitudes and feelings can cause an actual buildup of poisons in the body that in turn cause illnesses. In other words, the wrong state of mind can actually poison your body!
That is why faith is such a marvelous cure. Knowing that your heavenly Father loves you and is going to take care of you and yours — your health, your family, your future, your job, everything — eliminates fear and gives you peace of mind, contentment of heart, and a feeling of spiritual well-being that brings rest to your vital organs, and that in turn actually causes the elimination of poisons from your body. Simple faith in God’s love is the best medicine there is!
Reflections © The Family International. All Rights Reserved.
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