It is ten years since I first began to grasp the truth as revealed in Christian Science. My steps have seemed slow, but when I look back the change seems wonderful. In my pre-Science days there never was a time when my health was robust. Every year for a week at least, and generally for many weeks, I was kept from my daily duties by illness. For about eight years now my attendance at work has been practically unbroken. I had a rough time at first; but gradually one disturber of the peace after another was silenced, until I found myself able to undertake quite heavy extra work and enjoy good, steady health all the time. For this physical well-being I am very grateful, but for the physical change as a proof of the rightness of my religion I am far more grateful. As a student of Christian Science I rejoice over a physical healing because it indicates the loss of some erroneous thinking. It is the result of spiritualized thought. If my better thinking banishes a weakness or a disease, then my consciousness must be so much the cleaner, the better, the more harmonious.
Sometimes a healing is slow and hard to come by; sometimes it slips into one's consciousness like the dawn on a summer morning. A few years ago I became aware of a painful condition in my left elbow which I thought was rheumatism, resulting from overheating and cooling down quickly without covering my bare arms. I felt very glad it had not come to my right elbow, as I used it when I played tennis; but I let the matter rest there. In a short time, however, the pain was in my right elbow too, and I could hardly play at all. Then I began to correct my thinking, and got relief; but evidently fear remained, for I was very careful to cover my arms when I came off the courts. At the beginning of the following winter the pain came in my back and lower limbs, whether I was playing or not. I knew then I had to lose all fear of this error; and step by step I did so. When I saw that rheumatism could never occur to a spiritual idea, and had no consciousness in which to dwell, I was healed.
At one time I suffered from nervous pains in my head and eyes for about three weeks. I seemed to come to no conclusion about the trouble. Then I attended a lecture on Christian Science; and as I was listening the clouds lifted, and I was healed. How the healing comes, or of what we are healed, does not matter so much as the fact that we are healed in Christian Science.
