ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, I suddenly experienced overall weakness and a debilitating pain. Although the pain was localized in my arm, the pain was severe enough that it made movement of any kind very difficult, and my arm was useless. This condition appeared suddenly, without any apparent reason or cause, and over the next few days my daily activities were reduced to nothing. The thought did occur to me that maybe there was some kind of malignant growth causing this. However, a lifetime of healing through Christian Science had shown me that God's purpose for man is health and peace, so it was natural for me to turn to God for healing. At this challenging physical time, my husband's support of my desire for healing through Christian Science and his own prayers on my behalf enabled me to be free of worry or concern for him and gave me the time to read, study, and pray each day and to see steady progress.
For a couple of months my days were spent in a chair doing this spiritual study and prayer, and at one point the prayers of a Christian Science practitioner helped me to gain strength. These prayers helped me to see that as a child of God, I had freedom to express Him in every way. Feeling this, I began to make small steps of progress, spending more time out of the chair and resuming some of the day-to-day activity of keeping house, cooking, and walking in the yard. However, on my first experience of going outside of the house and using public transportation, I was unable to walk across the parking lot without resting. I wondered if I'd be an invalid for the rest of my life. But I didn't wonder long, as my daily reading of Science and Health had shown me that with God all things are possible. And I trusted that truth.
Today, I don't recall any particular passage that led me to freedom; rather the healing resulted from my daily turning to God in my prayers and in my study for direction and in gaining clarity about my spiritual identity. And as I did so, I increasingly began to give up doubts and fears that come with a limited mortal sense of life. Science and Health was what I read most because it instructed and showed me over and over through example and detail how the Bible explains reality as spiritual, perfect, and permanent—supreme over the occurrence of disease and sin that a material view brings. Science and Health also revealed and explained how this material view can be proven to be a mistaken and unreal sense of what life really is.
