I have always appreciated active membership in a Christian Science branch church and the spiritual discipline of working with other church members, learning to be more patient and tolerant. At times when sickness has threatened to overwhelm me, the desire to be at a particular post in church has impelled me to pray more fervently and trust God more earnestly; healing has then occurred in time for me to fulfill my duty.
The first eighteen years of my marriage were spent in another country, and my husband and I had to send our children back to boarding school in England for their education. On the day I took our eight year-old to her new school at the beginning of the first term, we said goodbye happily enough. But at bedtime, when normally I would have been tucking her in, I began to feel a bit subdued.
It was a Wednesday, so I went to the evening testimony meeting at church. One of the hymns sung that evening included these words: "Like as a mother, God comforteth His children" (Hymnal No. 174). The realisation that God was there to comfort her like a mother so uplifted me that I never worried about my daughter from that moment on. Nor did I worry about our son when he later joined her in England.
