During my early teens I stopped going to the Christian Science Sunday School because I couldn't relate to it. When my marriage broke up over ten years later, I began looking desperately for some indication that there was something about this life that I could depend on. I would spend my nights reading the Bible, as well as books on occultism and psychology. Then, soon after my separation, I began drinking heavily to keep myself from thinking. Eventually two friends who were not Christian Scientists, and did not know each other, asked me during the same week why I had not looked into the religion I had been raised in.
As my copy of the textbook, Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, was in a basement three thousand miles away, I went to a Christian Science Reading Room, rather reluctantly I must admit, and bought a copy. While reading the first few pages of the textbook, I was amazed to realize how much I agreed with what I was reading. I felt that there had to be something in the book beyond what I had understood as a child and beyond what I was currently seeing, so I spent hours reading and studying it. After a while, Science and Health, along with the Bible, were the only two books that I would go back to night after night. I would read until the early hours of the morning, managing to get up and go to work the next day by recalling Mrs. Eddy's words (Science and Health, pp. 519-520): "The highest and sweetest rest, even from a human standpoint, is in holy work."
I drank less over the months that followed, and I developed more trust in God as a present power and reality. Still, amid major changes I could see in my own character and in my relationships with others, I yearned for more understanding.
