One afternoon about two years ago, I felt a pain in my breast. At first, I didn't think too much about it. But by the next morning, the pain was severe and was accompanied by significant swelling and redness throughout that area of my body. I began to pray with the help of a Christian Science practitioner.
Because I could barely sleep, I prayed virtually day and night. I pored over the weekly Bible Lesson (found in the Christian Science Quarterly), read articles on metaphysics, studied the Bible and Science and Health, and talked with God. I reached out to Him with humility, acknowledging His allness and His love for me. Although the practitioner and I prayed about fear, I really never felt afraid during this time. I was convinced that God was caring for me. I felt wrapped in His love.
As I studied, this statement from Science and Health struck a chord with me: "Anatomy, when conceived of spiritually, is mental self-knowledge, and consists in the dissection of thoughts to discover their quality, quantity, and origin. Are thoughts divine or human? That is the important question. This branch of study is indispensable to the excision of error" (p. 462). I realized that I had to look deeply at my own thoughts to determine what I needed to learn from this situation—not as some kind of psychoanalytic exercise, but as a way to see myself more clearly as God sees me.
