I WAS EXPERIENCING a sharp pain in the big toe of my left foot. Because I've experienced physical healing through Christian Science before, I immediately began praying. I prayed from the basis of knowing my spiritual identity. I reasoned that because God is Spirit and is All, then matter, Spirit's opposite, couldn't have any sensation. When the pain persisted, though, I decided it was time to ask a Christian Science practitioner for added support through prayer.
He reminded me that we were not dealing with a problem of a painful toe, per se, but with a false suggestion—a belief that I was material. Because it seemed that matter was informing me my toe was in pain, the practitioner mentioned that I was only truly receiving information from God, rather than from the material senses. I began to see that I was already at the point of spiritual perfection and that now, I must claim it and demand it.
My toe was most bothersome at night when I was trying to sleep. On one of these nights, the practitioner recommended that I be grateful for every source of movement and that I should not be praying to get well, but to understand God and my unbroken relationship to Him. We talked further about how the suggestion that I was a material being trying to heal a physical injury was nothing more than a lie. I should instead turn to and focus on the truth that I was spiritual, because every thought about good, or God, helps to destroy erroneous suggestions. He then shared with me these related words from Science and Health: "A spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive" (p. 463). This helped me to be bold in my expectancy of good.
