SEVERAL YEARS AGO my wife and I were driving home after visiting one of our daughters in another state about 1,000 miles away. On the third day of the return trip, I began to experience extreme pain in my back and abdominal area. The next morning, after we arrived home, the pain was so intense that I could not sit down at my desk. Because I'm accustomed to experiencing healing by gaining a better understanding of God, I knew this was what I needed to do in this case. So, standing, I read the Weekly Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly several times. The spiritual truths I was reading lifted my thinking above the material picture, and the pain disappeared.
The next morning in the shower, however, I noticed a bulge in my side about the size of half an orange. I prayed during the day to understand whatever it was I needed to know about God and His creation, including me. When the bulge had not receded by the next morning, I called a Christian Science practitioner to support me through prayer. She brought a statement to my attention from Science and Health to pray with and think about: "Suffer no claim of sin or sickness to grow upon the thought" (p. 390).
I continued to pray, and sometime during the day a helpful thought came to me. I recognized it as a message from God: "You are Love's expression." At the time, I accepted this thought as true, but I did not ponder it deeply.
