My first exposure to Christian Science was in January 2000. I lived just a few blocks from a Christian Science church in downtown Las Vegas, and upon my initial visit to the church, I was still drinking alcohol, smoking cigars, pipes, and cigarettes, in addition to gambling.
I had moved to Las Vegas from Brooklyn in 1992, soon after my wife and I had broken up. By then I’d been drinking and smoking for 17 years.
Back in Brooklyn, I had been very active in my church, the Baptist church, where I served as a deacon, as well as the church’s accountant. My spiritual growth in the Baptist faith was satisfying, but I felt a void in my relationship with God and had not yet realized that I had been given dominion from God over sin, sickness, even death (as I later learned in Christian Science). And I had not been able to overcome my addictions. As part of the duties of deacon, once a month a group of us would visit the sick and shut-ins—those who were in the hospital, or sick at home, and could not come to church. At these visits, we prayed, discussed the Bible, and gave some comfort, but spiritual healing and relying on God to restore health was a foreign concept to me. I might mention that as a child I attended both Catholic and Seventh-Day Adventist schools and church services, prior to attending public school starting at the ninth grade. These schools assisted in molding my formative years as a Christian, but left me seeking something more spiritually satisfying.
