I experienced chest pains periodically when I was in college. Not only was the condition painful, but it limited my physical activities. I couldn't run, bike, or hike with the freedom I'd previously enjoyed. I prayed about this, as l'd always done when I needed help. And although I asked a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me on three or four occasions, I continued to experience these symptoms for a number of years. I often felt frustrated, but I always believed I could trust God to heal me.
There were two turning points, I now see. My husband and I signed up for a very challenging bike trip that required us to be in top physical condition. In the months beforehand, I prayed simply to be healed before the trip; otherwise I couldn't see how I could possibly complete it. But one day when I was praying, it came to me that I needed to look a little more closely at the motive behind this prayer. I realized I'd accepted that my heart, as a material organ, was the source of my strength, health, and freedom in life. And that it was up to this organ to provide me with health and freedom. I saw my mistake in relying on anything other than God, or divine Spirit, who I understood to be Life itself. I didn't have to wait for any part of my body to act a certain way. I knew that because my health comes from Spirit, it is uninterruptible. I ended up completing the bike trip without experiencing any of the painful symptoms that had before accompanied any kind of strenuous activity.
The complete healing, however, came a few years later. At some point, I began to examine certain philosophical beliefs that I had taken in during my college years: that certain people are considered superior to others; that one should act out of self-interest in order to be successful; that humanity doesn't need the help of the Divine to solve any of its problems. It occurred to me that I hadn't seen until now how these ideas diverged from what I held to be true about life based on my study of Christian Science. I hadn't sufficiently examined these conflicting beliefs. So I began to "dig up every seed of error's sowing," as Mrs. Eddy put it in Science and Health (p. 79). I questioned each one of these materially based philosophical beliefs, one by one, and replaced them with what I knew to be the spiritual truth as taught in Christian Science.
