One Sunday in my class of ninth-graders, even though I had a very well prepared Sunday School lesson, we never got to it. One of the girls had had a fight with her mom during the drive to church that morning and wanted to know how to pray about it. Another had been told that she needed to have glasses. How should she pray? Each one of the six or seven pupils present that day had an urgent problem he or she wanted to discuss right away. As we went around the table listening to each one, we talked together of what was spiritually true, what God was seeing of His child in each case.
The last one we came to was my own son. He had broken his arm a few days before. His dad and I had given him a choice about how he wanted to handle it—through medical care or through Christian Science treatment. He had chosen prayer, and we called a Christian Science practitioner to help us as we prayed. At that point in our class we began to share information gained through our prayer and study. Two Sundays later, my son had complete use of the arm; all could see that Christian Science healing is based on fact, and it works!
Teaching about the hows and whys of spiritual healing as Christ Jesus practiced it is a tremendous subject. One good way to approach this subject in Sunday School is to teach by example, illustrating that absolute truths are relative to everyday experience. Sometimes I'll recount a testimony of healing I have heard at a Wednesday evening testimony meeting at our church or share a healing I've read in a recent Christian Science periodical. These are just a few ways to teach about prayer and healing. But even more important is the teacher's own use of prayer—before, during, and after Sunday School.
