I HAVE BEEN A CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST all of my life and have always turned to God for healing of any problem. I've been healed of poison ivy, colds, and injuries from sports. When I noticed last year that there were warts on my hand, I naturally started praying.
At first, I didn't pray too hard. I thought the warts would go away pretty easily. But instead, they began getting bigger and started bleeding a lot because I was playing basketball and football every day, and the warts would open up. It was getting annoying because every time I played, the warts would bleed—and they started to really hurt.
It didn't occur to me to use anything but prayer to deal with the warts, because I know prayer works. But I decided I had to be serious about praying. I thought about what I learned in Sunday School about how I was perfectly made by God. That meant that these warts were not created by God and could not be a part of me. Another thing I realized was that the warts were just an illusion. It's sort of like thinking that the world is flat from your point of view, but if you look at the earth from above, you see it's actually round. So from a material point of view it looked like there were warts on my hand, but from a spiritual point of view there weren't any—because God didn't make them. God is Spirit, and He only makes good. Mary Baker Eddy said that when we're tempted to believe an illusion, to "cling steadfastly to God and His idea." Then she wrote, "Allow nothing but His likeness to abide in your thought" (Science and Health, p. 495). So, I decided that I wouldn't look at my hands anymore to see if the warts were still there, because that would be giving power to an illusion. I wanted to give God the power.
