I called a Christian Science practitioner and said, "I am basically a very happy person, but the pressures of business and church work with which my husband is involved make him a heavily burdened individual. If only he would lighten up, then I would be completely happy and life would go along easily." What a limited concept of joy, happiness, and myself I was believing in! I believed my happiness to be in direct proportion to my husband's actions. The practitioner lovingly treated me to uplift my thought and to heal my limited view, but I continued to worry so much about my husband that I became ill. A deep-seated cough and congestion made me feel so weak that I had to walk very slowly. I began to realize that I needed to identify myself with God as His spiritual idea, and not with another person. This called for extensive prayer on my part.
I asked for additional treatment from a practitioner, and I spent each day praying and studying. I found this paragraph from Science and Health particularly inspiring: "Truth has no consciousness of error. Love has no sense of hatred. Life has no partnership with death. Truth, Life, and Love are a law of annihilation to everything unlike themselves, because they declare nothing except God" (p. 243). I found and assimilated a lot of wonderful spiritual truths about myself. Another quotation I applied to establishing my spiritual identity was, "The Christlike understanding of scientific being and divine healing includes a perfect Principle and idea,—perfect God and perfect man,—as the basis of thought and demonstration" (Science and Health, p. 259).
After several months of hard, vigorous study, my true identity as the child of God began to unfold more clearly in my consciousness. I began to see my husband's problems as illusions and not part of God's creation. Gradually, the cough left, and even the fear of being in a cold place where the condition might recur disappeared as well. In the years since my healing, my husband continues to have a vigorous work schedule, but I now know that a limiting, mortal law of overwork does not govern him—or anyone. I now trust in God's care for him and for me, and I know he is divinely directed and protected in all activity
