My junior year, my high school required me to attend a talk on breast cancer prevention and awareness. At the time of the talk, I had just come back from a retreat for young Christian Scientists, where I had developed a more spiritual outlook. So when I was confronted with the talk, I turned to what I knew to be true: that God, Spirit, created everything, and since God is good and the only power, there couldn’t be anything bad, such as disease, in His creation.
I had learned that I could pray about any problem and expect to feel God’s power and presence.
I hadn’t felt afraid at the time or even thought much more about the talk after that. But a few months later, when I developed several symptoms that had been mentioned during the talk, I was terrified. The speaker had stressed that the appropriate response to any symptoms was to go to a doctor as soon as possible.
