WHILE MY HUSBAND AND I were walking in our neighborhood, I tripped over a crack in the sidewalk where tree roots had lifted the concrete. I landed full force on my face, with my nose and chin taking the blow. My first words were: "There are no accidents!" My authority for this statement came from Science and Health, where it says: "Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind ....
"Under divine Providence there can be no accidents, since there is no room for imperfection in perfection" (p. 424).
A woman who was passing by stopped to help. I was not ready to get up, but was able to crawl onto a nearby lawn, and this dear woman stayed with me while my husband went to get our car. I thanked her for her kindness and assured her that I was all right, even though I knew I didn't look very good. My husband told me later that when he first saw my face, my nose was pushed over to one side and looked like it was broken. There was a lot of bleeding, but this stopped almost immediately.
I was so aware of God's protection and care during this experience. I felt so grateful, for instance, that my teeth and mouth were untouched. In the Bible, the 91st Psalm assures us: "He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone" (v. 11, 12). I loved the assurance in this psalm, because it helped me see a little more clearly that God is always present and that His angels, or thoughts, are always with us to support us and meet our need no matter what.
When my husband and I reached our home, I was able to walk inside on my own. We then called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me, and I so appreciated the loving and immediate help. My husband was also supportive and read to me from the Bible and from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy.
For 24 hours or so, the memory of the experience kept replaying itself, encouraging me to relive the moment of impact. I had to constantly watch my thought to stop this replaying. I thought of a statement by Mrs. Eddy: "Blot out the images of mortal thought . . ." (Science and Health, p.391). Looking up the word blot, I found that one definition was "to erase." So I made an effort to erase these thoughts, and soon they stopped.
Many other statements of Mrs. Eddy's were so helpful. One was: "Have no fear that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed as the result of a law of any kind, when it is self-evident that matter can have no pain nor inflammation. Your body would suffer no more from tension or wounds than the trunk of a tree which you gash or the electric wire which you stretch, were it not for mortal mind" (Science and Health, p.393). This helped me to know that there truly is no material law by which I can be governed. I was and am governed only by God's law of spiritual harmony.
While humanly — that is, according to the material senses — the incident happened, I knew that the experience had not touched my true identity as God's idea, His child. It was not long after this that there was no more pain in my nose, even though there was still swelling and it was sensitive to the touch. But I knew the healing was taking place.
That night there was a lot of soreness in my body, so I reached out to God in prayer to show me how to pray. Immediately an answer came to me in the form of a question: "If you had a dream in which you fell, would you be sore when you woke up? I thought, "Of course not!"
Then the first chapter of Genesis came to mind. I've learned from studying Christian Science that this chapter gives the true account of God's creation — that each individual's true being is God's image and likeness. The creation account in the second chapter, however, was termed by Mrs. Eddy the "Adam-dream." So I thought of this human experience as the Adam-dream I needed to be wakened from in order to accept my true being as God's image and likeness. I held on to these thoughts.
In just a few days, all soreness was gone. All that remained for a very short time were a couple of black eyes. And my nose is now straight and normal.
Christian Science heals, and I have found how important it is to immediately turn to the truth — the spiritual facts of being — and to stick with it.
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, US
