When Christian Science was presented to me, I was very much in need of help. We had left Vienna after the annexation, and I felt so bitter and unhappy that it actually made me ill, so ill that two major operations were performed. Both failed, and I was declared a semi-invalid who was not to work at all. To bend down or lift anything heavy was pointed out as most dangerous for me. As I had never been ill before, I did not know how to cope with this, and I questioned why it should have happened to me. My children were small and needed me, but I was away most of the time in nursing homes or hospitals.
A kind neighbor, who had seen the doctor's car before our house daily, offered me some Christian Science literature, and though I was very reluctant at first, I eventually read the textbook, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. I shall always feel profoundly grateful for the loving, motherly woman who went out of her way to tell a stranger how to get well. This faithful student took me to my first Christian Science lecture, where I saw only happy faces. I knew then that these people had found a way of living which satisfied them. Since then Christian Science has done so much for me that I hardly know how to begin to relate my experiences.
When it was pointed out to me that bitterness and resentment had made me sick and that "Love is the liberator" (Science and Health, p. 225), I was able to get up and attend church services and meetings regularly. Now I am a useful person, working more than I did before I became ill and enjoying it. There was a time when housework, which I was not used to, made me so tired that I cried with exhaustion. Since I know that it is not the task, but my thoughts about it that count, I hardly mind the work; in fact, I refused to have help, though I could have had it.
