Christian Science has helped me in so many ways that it would be impossible for me to express my full gratitude for it. But because of an overwhelming desire to give in return for all I have received, I submit this testimony and its account of some of the good that has come into my experience through an understanding of Science.
Although it was my privilege to have been reared in a home where Christian Science was practiced, it was not until I was married and had children of my own that I turned wholeheartedly to God. Then I earnestly sought to make practical in my own experience the truths I had ignored in the satisfying of a so-called personal sense of happiness. As our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, says in the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 322), "The sharp experiences of belief in the supposititious life of matter, as well as our disappointments and ceaseless woes, turn us like tired children to the arms of divine Love."
I reached the point where I longed to dislodge a material sense of pleasure in smoking so that I might enjoy my God-given spiritual sense of freedom. Many months passed in prayerful, earnest work such as we are taught to do in Christian Science, but when I was with neighbors and friends who smoked, the temptation was very aggressive. It was always accompanied by the suggestion that it was just as bad to want a cigarette as it was to smoke one. Thus, under the guise of honesty, I would be misled and would yield.
