Although I was raised in a Christian Scientist family, I don't think I really understood the true significance of this Science until I began to understand God as Love. When I first married I felt my mother-in-law was quite pushy. But over the next twenty-eight years I came to see that I didn't have to strive for my place in God's love—a place that couldn't be overshadowed by person or circumstance. My awakening took many steps. It wasn't easy for my mother-in-law or for me.
The first significant healing I had was one of lumps on my legs. They seemed to come from nowhere and they kept multiplying. One day this line from Science and Health came to me: "In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error, —self-will, self-justification, and self-love,—which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death" (p. 242). I remember at the time I was feeling adamant about something my mother-in-law wanted me to do that I didn't want to do. I saw these hard, painful lumps symbolized the adamant of error. I also saw that this belief that mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law are at strife was a myth! These mental stones needed to be replaced with the rock, Christ—Truth and Love. Over the next few days the lumps dissolved—all but one. Then I remembered a verse from the Bible: "There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down" (Matt. 24:2). That last lump left and I was healed.
Still, there was more to learn about maintaining a harmonious relationship with my mother-in-law. One day, a few years ago, I was walking our youngest son to school. There were two high-school boys arguing. Our son was quite frightened and wanted to walk far away from them. I told him that those boys were in their true nature God's ideas; they were loving, and could only love one another, and they knew it. When we looked back, they were gone. The fight was over. Thinking about this later, I saw that willpower has no power and that no one could have any power over me unless it was of God. This is true because "Man has no underived power," as Mrs. Eddy says in Unity of Good (p. 39). This was another step toward my dominion over feeling dominated by my mother-in-law.
