While on my way to meet my wife for lunch the other day, I took the subway in Boston—something that I hadn’t done for quite awhile.  What struck me was the significant number of young men and women passengers in their 20’s and 30’s that had large areas of their bodies tattooed.

And then I wondered: “What about the rest of us—are we tattooed?”

“Huh?” you may be asking yourself.  “What’s he talking about?  I’ve never done anything even remotely like that to my body!”

That may be true outwardly, but what about allowing errors in thinking, the belief of diseases, sickness, sin, death, grief, trauma, impoverishment, failed or difficult relationships, lack of education, mortal limitations of any kind—“all the ills that the flesh is heir to”—to be “tattooed” on your experience?

Tattoos that seem indelible.  Tattoos that continue to graphically attempt to portray the false image of identity—an identity that is wholly or even partially material and mortal.  An identity that is completely untrue about each and every one of us as the reflection of Almighty God—the only true identity that we really have!

And we need to honestly ask ourselves if we’re in any way clinging to those tattered mental tattoos—graphics that appear manifested in the real estate of our lives.  Are we perhaps perceiving them as a badge of nobility, of courage, of wistful nostalgia, or as something to be fascinated by, and so forth?

Let’s realize that we have the power and authority, bestowed on us by God, to utterly and completely remove any and all vestiges of those false pictures of ourselves and thereby experience more and more of our true identity—an identity that is completely spiritual!

How?

By vigorously and whole-heartedly turning to God to learn the spiritual lessons that will eradicate whatever those past or present lies about us, our neighbor, and God may be.  In other words, by doing what Mary Baker stated in Science and Health, p.390:

Rise in the conscious strength of the spirit of Truth to overthrow the plea of mortal mind, alias matter, arrayed against the supremacy of Spirit. Blot out the images of mortal thought and its beliefs in sickness and sin. Then, when thou art delivered to the judgment of Truth, Christ, the judge will say, “Thou art whole!”

And that wholeness as the perfect image and likeness of God should be the only image we want displayed!