ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, I woke one morning feeling cold all over—something I'd never experienced before. As prayer in Christian Science has healed me many times, I began to pray with the truth that we are all created by God in His image and likeness. I mentally declared that as God is Spirit and I reflect Spirit, my true being must also be spiritual. I further reasoned that because God is immortal and is not deteriorated by sickness or other causes that ultimately lead to death, then these facts of being had to be true for me too. During the day I prayed frequently to affirm these truths.
However, when I woke the next morning, I felt even more cold and wobbly, like a jellyfish in arctic waters! In addition to reminding myself how I'd prayed about God's creation and my spiritual identity, I also thought about the concepts put forth in "the scientific statement of being," which begins, "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter" (Science and Health, p. 468). Matter, the opposite of Spirit, has no intelligence to cause or communicate the condition of my health, so the material body couldn't tell me whether I was cold or not. I discerned that Mind alone determines my well-being and is the source of only good thoughts, never the source of thoughts about disease or ailments.
That evening, when I had a quiet time to pray further, I wondered why I hadn't succeeded in throwing off the chills, knowing as I did that God's infinite handiwork includes nothing that can cause discomfort or harm.
So I turned to God to help me see more clearly the truth that heals. Then the thought came that this chill, or any other ailment, was not part of me but was like a mere shadow. My wife reminded me that when you vacuum a carpet, the shadows are not picked up because they have no substance: They are nothing—simply the absence of light. Shine a light over a shadow, and it disappears altogether. I saw that I needed to hold my thoughts to the light of Truth. And further, to see that error—whether physical discomfort or any other form of inharmony—and Truth couldn't exist simultaneously any more than could darkness and light.
With gratitude for these ideas, I continued to pray to recognize that my nature was wholly spiritual, and that material conditions have no creator and therefore no more substance than a shadow. Within a short time, I felt sure that I'd been healed, even though the symptoms hadn't yet abated.
When I woke the next morning, the chills had dissolved completely, and I had the spring back in my legs. I've never had a return of that condition.
A day or two later, while still full of gratitude for this healing, I knocked my head on a low beam of the ceiling. The bump was quite painful, but I once again turned to prayer. The gist of this statement from Science and Health immediately came to me: "When an accident happens, you think or exclaim, 'I am hurt!' Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real" (p. 397). Within about a minute, I realized that these truths had freed me from the incident, and I no longer felt hurt or had any aftereffects. The thought of being hurt had been replaced by knowing the truth that God perpetually maintains our freedom from any kind of damage or injury.
I am ever grateful for having been taken to Sunday School by a neighbour when I was five, and for all our Church gives us, including the weekly Bible Lessons, the Christian Science periodicals, class instruction, and so much more—all in support of our spiritual growth.
WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND
