I was weighing in after wrestling practice when one of my friends pointed out that I had a skin disease—ringworm—on my back. Because it's considered highly contagious, everyone was freaking out. They were all telling me stories about people they knew who'd had it, and how they'd been out of the wrestling season for a month. My coach told me I wouldn't be able to wrestle for at least a couple weeks, and that I'd have to go to the doctor to get treated. I started to become really scared. I didn't want to miss any practice or tournaments.
When I got home, I talked with my mom about it, and we decided I should call a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me. It was great, because even when I told him everything that was wrong, he was still totally calm. And he told me a story that was really helpful—about a guy who was on a navy submarine when he suddenly got a bad case of poison ivy. The thing is, the guy hadn't been anywhere near poison ivy—he'd just heard about someone who'd gotten it and what some of the symptoms were. This guy was a Christian Scientist, and as he started to pray about the poison ivy, he realized that all he was dealing with was a belief, a mistaken idea about what God created.
In Genesis, chapter one, it says that God created everything good. So where is there room for disease in that creation? Nowhere. God's creation is 100 percent good, like God. Any belief of bad, then, including disease, is just that—a belief, an error, a mental suggestion. As soon as the guy on the submarine understood that, he saw that the belief couldn't have any power over him, and the poison ivy symptoms went away faster than they'd appeared.
