THE FOLLOWING EXPERIENCE was my first healing in Christian Science. As a young teen, I needed to change the direction of my life. I was "a problem teenager." I truly had no self-esteem and felt my life had no purpose. I did not know where to turn. One day I decided to pick up the Bible. This was not a normal answer in the home that I grew up in, but my grandmother had talked to me about the power of God when I was a young girl. I read but did not really understand it. However, somehow I knew this was the place to find what I needed. So I kept reading, hoping that something would change to bring my life more in line with what God had intended for me.
Somehow I knew the Bible was the place to find what I needed.
This search was sometimes very uplifting, and other times it was downright scary. I felt that some statements in the Bible, if taken literally, condemned man. Then I remembered that my mother, later on in her life, had found comfort in a book that had been introduced to her: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. She had given me a copy, which I had put away for quite a few years. After I really started committing myself to reading this book, I began to see that the Bible was filled with good news about me and my relation to God. Science and Health explained the spiritual sense of the Scriptures. I saw that "man" (a generic term for all of God's sons and daughters) is made in God's image and likeness. This opened a whole new view of the Bible to me. It was transforming my way of thinking, enabling me to see myself more spiritually, and others as well. I guess you could say that all along I had been held captive by the belief that I was a sinner and that character flaws were my true selfhood. With the new thinking I was gaining, many of the false characteristics disappeared. One day, I met a former in-law in a public place, and she did not know me. I had to tell her who I was. She commented on my appearance (favorably), and said she would never have known me if I had not told her who I was.
