I first heard of Christian Science when a child between six and seven years old, at which time my father was healed of a severe and so-called chronic stomach trouble. About a year later my grandmother, whom I had always known as an invalid, unable to walk or to eat any but a very light diet, was also healed. By the time I was ten years old I had read "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, and later, when my father purchased "Miscellaneous Writings," I read that. I am most grateful for the early teaching which I received from these books and my father, as it gave me, in a large measure, a foundation for right thinking and freedom from fear which in later years I have appreciated more fully than I could at the time.
Christian Science was comparatively little known in those days, and for many years we did not have the privilege of church, Sunday school, or practitioners in the towns in which we lived. At times I would drift away from the study until I reached the stage of experience when I came "into the fold under" God's "compelling rod" (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 80), and found, as our dear Leader says in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 208), that "His rod brings to view His love, and interprets to mortals the gospel of healing." Then followed the healing of bitter grief, of a sense of injustice and of separation, fear, and lack; also the losing of the false sense of "love" and the gaining of a true understanding of God as Love.
One of the greatest blessings of all those received through this experience was learning to say, "Thy will be done," with a complete absence of any desire to outline what that will should be. This, I found, is not accomplished through merely repeating the words and thinking that one means them, but through self-abnegation and the realization of the one divine Mind and the omnipotence of that Mind.
