About eighteen years ago my piano teacher, who was a Christian Scientist, recommended that I read the textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy. This teacher had been very good to me; so to please her I obtained a copy and began reading it. It was hard at first, because I did not really want to read it.
Soon after that I was entirely without money, food, and employment. I said to myself: "Christian Science is something which either works or it doesn't. This is the time to find out." Although I believed in God, I thought that He was capable of punishing man and that one had to petition for His favor. I began reading Science and Health again, and I found God to be altogether good. The third tenet on page 497 of the textbook took care of my belief in a God who punishes.
Within hours I received a small amount of money with which I procured food. I applied for work and got it. Afterward my professional activity grew and flowered.
A number of physical healings followed. Some were those of conditions of long standing, and some were of problems which appeared in the course of daily experience. One of the latter was that of the common cold, of which I had had several every winter. During one experience the coughing seemed endless. One day I turned to the textbook. As I studied, the thought came very plainly, "Nothing can separate you from the love of God." I got up and went to work completely healed.
At another time, on a Saturday afternoon, I was crossing a wet street and fell, turning one ankle badly and cutting the other! leg so that it bled profusely. When I returned to the office, a co-worker became frightened and sent out for bandages. I kept repeating statements about the allness of God, and by the time the bandages arrived, I could stand. When it was time to go home, I was much better.
That evening I was to teach a class at a service organization canteen. One of the young men in the class was an orderly in a hospital. He at once noticed that I limped a little and remarked about it. I made some flippant reply without handling the claim, and we all joked about the condition. It did not seem important, but almost immediately the pain reappeared. The next morning the ankle had swollen again, and I found it difficult to walk. After church I went to a Reading Room and worked earnestly in Christian Science. At the end of an hour when I walked out, there was no pain and no swelling. The lesson I learned from this experience was that one cannot ignore or be flippant about error; he must deny it and affirm the truth.
When I first came into Christian Science, I was bothered with chronic fatigue. Into my thought would often come the words. "I am so tired, so tired." One day the suggestion came again, and I stopped suddenly, joyously thinking, "Why, I'm not tired!" And I was not, although I certainly had been just as busy as ever. When the healing had come, I do not know, but it had been some time since I had felt overtired. This is a proof of the healing which comes about naturally through the consistent day-by-day study of the Lesson-Sermon in the Christian Science Quarterly and through the other studying of Christian Science which we do.
I am so grateful for Christian Science that I do not see why I have not written a testimony before. My thanks go out to God for membership in The Mother Church and a branch church, for class instruction, and for the consecrated practitioners who have helped me at various times. But more than for anything else, I am grateful for increased spiritual understanding, for all the activities of our movement, and for having a part in them through branch church work.— Washington, District of Colmbia.
