LAST SPRING, I taught English classes in Puerto Quijarro, a small, tropical town on the border of Bolivia and Brazil. One evening after teaching my high school classes, I came back to my dorm room feeling exhausted. The combination of the intense heat along with suffering from what appeared to be food poisoning overwhelmed me. I felt very tired, so I decided to head to bed and planned on addressing my condition through prayer the next morning.
After a short rest, I awoke in the early morning hours feeling worse. Feeling practically immobile, I remembered that my brother and I had loaded several Christian Science Sentinel Radio programs onto my iPod. Listening to these healings of how others had been helped through prayer was just what I needed. As I listened to testimony after testimony, I focused every ounce of energy I had in grasping the healing truth each testifier presented. The more my consciousness was completely focused on hearing the healing message of each speaker, the temptation to see myself as a poisoned mortal began to disappear. Although I was alone in what to some might seem a remote corner of the world, hearing the encouraging healing words of the testifiers made me feel as though I was surrounded by a squad of teammates, who were all demonstrating the exact same healing power I yearned to feel.
An hour or two later, I felt capable of moving myself outside, and I grabbed the Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson and walked out in the muggy early morning air. As I read through that week's Lesson, I was encouraged by the statement, "Ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord" (I Cor. 15:58). I thought of the energy and enthusiasm I tried to bring to my classes each day and how "God loveth a cheerful giver" (II Cor. 9:7). If God loves a cheerful giver, He would never take the giver out of his rightful job, nor take the cheerfulness out of the giver—that just would not make sense!
