Around The Beginning Of This last year, I came down with a severe case of shingles—a horrible skin condition that I had seen my mother suffer with when I was growing up. Medical books say this condition normally takes four to six weeks to pass and often leaves residual painful nerve damage. Since my mother had suffered from this condition, I was well aware of what it was and what it could mean.
At the time of the onset of this condition, I was very busy at work with a major project and needed to do a lot of running around. So the pain presented a pretty big challenge for me. Although I have experienced many healings using Christian Science over the last ten years (when I began studying Christian Science seriously), I hadn't before had to deal with any so-called "serious" condition. Also I was very afraid that there would be permanent damage, as I had read about that possibility and had seen it firsthand because my mum had permanent scarring from shingles. The practitioner suggested I study and pray with several passages from Science and Health. One in particular stood out to me, and I hung onto it like a lifeline: "... nothing inharmonious can enter being, for Life is God" (p. 228).
Even though I'm the first to scorn the obsessive references made these days in the media and advertising to genetic causes of just about anything, nevertheless there in the background of my thinking was the idea that there may have been a genetic cause for my condition—knowing that my mother had suffered from the same disease. However, that citation on page 228 goes on to address this point: "Heredity is a prolific subject for mortal belief to pin theories upon [indeed it is, I thought!]; but if we learn that nothing is real but the right, we shall have no dangerous inheritances, and fleshly ills will disappear." These truths about the nonreality of material heredity reduced my fear and gave me a calm sense of being removed from the symptoms.
