Although I was reared in a wonderful home where religious ideals were important (my father was a minister), as an adult I began to feel the need for different answers to my questions about God and about what life really is. A new business associate of my husband was the first Christian Scientist we had ever met. He let me barrage him with questions about his religion, which had been only a strange name to me. Before long I borrowed Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy from a public library and read it from cover to cover in two weeks. Soon I bought my own copy and started studying the Lesson-Sermons, outlined in the Quarterly. Life took on new meaning.
Within two years a special voluntary project involving my professional library training gave me an opportunity to prove what this new outlook meant. The project was the organization of the work involved in producing a cataloging system covering the twelve thousand books in the city library. The project seemed so enormous that it overwhelmed me periodically. Doubts assailed me, tempting me to believe that the project could not be accomplished. Several nights were spent in wakefulness because of my anxiety in making decisions and then doubting them. A practitioner was called several times to help bring calmness and clarity to my thought so that the way could be seen.
Finally the realization came that these doubts were nothing more than mortal mind trying to saddle me with the limitations of material time and energy and with the uncertainty of not knowing what to do or when to do it. As the Christian Science teaching that there is only one Mind, God, became clear to me, I knew that I was not a person with a mind separate from God.
The Bible states (Gen.1:26), "God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." I knew that my true selfhood is the image and likeness of God. Since God is Mind, and as His likeness I reflect Mind, the realization came that every step of the way was unfolding as it was necessary for me to know it. I was not outlining; only God outlines.
The human egotism of claiming a separate mind of my own was destroyed. This brought calmness, and the ideas necessary to progess in the project flowed continuously. No longer was I awake nights because of doubt or fear, but because I needed the quietness of the night for the ideas to flood my consciousness. There was a continuous feeling of gratitude for every step of progress made in the project.
After being awake nights, I could go to my regular position, work all day, then go to the special project in the evening with no sense of fatigue or lack of alertness to the demands of the work. The statement from Science and Health (p. 519), "God rests in action," sustained me. I understood that since in reality I was the reflection of Mind, I could claim this sense of rest and truly prove the truth of Isaiah's words (40:31), "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."
The project lasted three months, during which I held my own full-time position, drove more than twenty-five hundred miles to and from the project, worked more than three hundred and fifty hours on it, and kept my home going. At the end I was buoyant with no sense of having exerted myself, as human sense would have indicated I had. The calmness, joy, and success were the result of the understanding of God and man that the study of Christian Science was bringing me.
During these months, it was also possible for me to become a member of a branch church and, soon afterward, a member of The Mother Church. Since then, through my deepening understanding of Science, physical difficulties have been quickly healed with the help of a practitioner or through my own work. Also, the wondrous privilege of class instruction has been mine as a necessary, logical step in learning more of how Jesus' promise is to be realized, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also" (John 14:12).
It is wonderful to be active in the Cause of Christian Science, which is benefiting so many and bringing light where there was darkness and confusion without it. Only by daily living the truths of Science shall I ever show my gratitude for Jesus' works and for the revelation of Truth that Mrs. Eddy made available to mankind through her life and writings.— West Lafayette, Indiana.
