ONE EVENING as I was going to bed, I felt a terrible pain in my back and hips and found that I couldn't straighten out my left leg. I also couldn't stand upright or find a comfortable position in which to sit or lie down. I was quite frightened.
My natural response was to pray. So the first thing I did was to affirm that God, divine Love, was right there with me. That God was only good, and did not inflict pain on me, His/Her beloved child. And if God wasn't the source of this pain, that meant it didn't have any authority or power over me, God's creation. I held to these thoughts. But the pain persisted, and by midnight I was feeling worse. Because of the late hour, I didn't want to call anyone to pray with me. So I turned to God with all my heart and asked Him to show me what to do. All at once the idea came to go to bed and prop my leg up in a certain way, and I found the pain subsided enough for me to fall asleep.
The next morning I was still quite uncomfortable and couldn't move much. I'd had many healings in Christian Science, but had never dealt with a severe physical difficulty like this before, and I wondered: Could prayer really help in this situation, or should I consider seeking medical attention? I decided that I could trust Christian Science to heal this, because God is all-powerful.
I called a Christian Science practitioner for support through prayer, and I could feel a calming effect right away. Just knowing that she was praying for me helped to alleviate my fear. I was able to think and pray more clearly. One idea from Science and Health was so helpful to me. It says, "Evil is not supreme; good is not helpless; nor are the socalled laws of matter primary, and the law of Spirit secondary" (p. 207). I realized that I wasn't just hanging out there on my own hoping for healing, but that there was supreme power in the good from God that I was claiming for myself.
By the next day, the pain had subsided, but I was still bent over. Then while I was praying, the word rigid came to me. While I didn't feel that I had been rigid about anything, I suddenly realized that I had been seeing someone else as being very rigid in regard to a particular situation. That was a wake-up call to me. I prayed to see this person, as well as myself, as nothing less than the perfect expression of divine Principle, or God—as responsive to divine Mind and subject to Love's direction.
On the third day, the practitioner and I had a good talk. All along she'd been encouraging me to feel God's love around me—to know that I was not alone, and that God was at hand. I'd been struggling to accept the ideas I'd been praying with. But now I began to see that because I am God's child, accepting the truth is a natural thing to do. That any suggestion of physical illness was not a part of my thinking as His child, and therefore I could reject it.
This was a turning point for me. A greater sense of peace came over me. And I was really feeling God's love, not just thinking it. Although the symptoms hadn't changed, I felt the healing was at hand. During the night I got up once, and I was able to extend my leg to a straight position for the first time in four days. By morning, I was standing fully upright and walking normally.
During the next several days I felt a few painless sensations in my back, but I was not hindered in any way. These feelings soon stopped. And the healing has been complete.
This experience made a very deep impression on me—not only for the lessons learned, but also for the feeling of being surrounded by Love that has remained with me. Furthermore, it has given me a deeper confidence in the power of Christian Science to heal.
WASILLA, ALASKA, US
