Praise has been welling from the bottom of my heart for a long time. In a family devoted to Christian Science, I loved to hear my grandmother sing Mrs. Eddy's hymns. And the first words I learned in the Christian Science Sunday School were Christ Jesus' words "Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32).
Yet in my late teens resentment, resistance, and rebellion challenged my spiritual advancement. Almost every church-going person seemed to me to be a hypocrite. I felt unable even to heal myself of a cold. Gradually, however, Science showed me how to separate the belief of material church from the spiritual idea of God's Church; and those negative traits, along with an oversensitiveness to hypocrisy, were replaced by the vividness of Church as God created it. Paul's description of "the church, which is his [Christ's] body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all" (Eph. 1:23) is to me a wonderfully dynamic way of presenting Church's ever-unfolding energy
After college and marriage I strove to learn even more about God in Christian Science. Daily talks with a Christian Science practitioner resulted in a healing of a skin disease. Although the condition was never diagnosed, a close relation had suffered from a similar difficulty that was regarded as hereditary. The practitioner insisted this had actually never been a part of the divine Mind, never a part of God's delight in His individual ideas, or a part of my real consciousness. One day I noticed a sentence in Science and Health that pointed out, "Disease is less than mind, and Mind can control it" (p. 378). The first mind has a small letter m. To me this meant that disease was even less than a so-called mind other than Mind, God. Though it took persistent prayer over several years, the disease did disappear entirely.
