It turned out to be one of those completely unexpected and, in time, unforgettable moments. My friend and I were window-shopping, and at one point we ended up in a bookstore where she waited in the front while I looked around. After a few minutes I returned to see if she minded waiting a bit longer, and I noticed she was now talking to a man in a wheelchair. I looked around a bit more, and when I returned again she was still talking to this man, as well as to several others who had gathered by her and were listening intently.
What had caught their attention? Well, my friend was a Christian healer. She was a full-time Christian Science practitioner who was devoted to helping others through prayer find a better way of life and to healing people of all types of difficulties. She literally glowed with a sense of God's love for man. While I had been looking at books, she had been filling the bookstore with so much love that she had drawn a host of people around her as she spoke to this man about God's love for him. As a result of their talk, he became interested in Christian Science and was later healed of the effects of an accident that had left him in a wheelchair for several years.
What had led my friend to speak to him when she could easily have avoided him? How had she been able to penetrate his gloom, stir his thinking, and send him on his way to healing? Speaking of those who would heal but who lack sympathy for others and are therefore deficient in affection, Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "Not having this spiritual affection, the physician lacks faith in the divine Mind and has not that recognition of infinite Love which alone confers the healing power."Science and Health, p. 366 The healing power, then? It must come from the recognition that infinite Love is the only power and presence.
