I have always loved animals and have found them to be especially receptive to spiritual healing over the years. So when a parakeet my husband and I rescued from New York City's Riverside Park began to manifest symptoms of a growth on his chest, we prayed.
We had saved this little bright blue budgerigar from the onslaught of a cold winter years earlier when we found him flying free and starving. We took him home, named him Zoebird, and over the next few months, through prayer and the opening of our hearts, the physical difficulties he had developed while in the wild were healed, and he became a much loved and vibrant member of our family. ZB, as we called him, flew freely in our house, shared meals with us, and had become one of the family.
When we first noticed that ZB was paying a lot of attention to his chest, which was growing progressively bigger and beginning to bleed, we chose to pray simply because we wanted to give him the best health care we knew. I called a Christian Science practitioner, and together we affirmed that God did not and could not create this harmful situation—that ZB was made perfect, because he was created in God's image. What's more, ZB had no idea that he was dealing with something thought to be deadly, and this helped me as I prayed, because it meant he was exempt from any of the frightening thoughts that might go along with such a condition. My job was to maintain my spiritual conviction, not to react with fear but to replace this alarming image of him with a spiritually perfect one.
