One recent Wednesday night at church, as I was ushering at the front door, a car drove into the church driveway and then did a U-turn on the lawn. I wondered if it was a prank. I ran out to the car and asked the driver what he was doing. The car sped off. I was angry with the driver for doing a U-turn on the lawn, as some deep ruts had been made.
As I walked back, I noticed that I could barely walk. One leg hurt a lot. I was concerned because it felt like an injury I’d had in the same leg 30 years prior. It had taken over a year to get better, though I admit I had not prayed about it then.
That night, as I sat in church, I realized that my thoughts about the driver needed correction. I knew that God did not see him as a bad person. God loved the driver, and God saw him as His harmless, sinless, and good child. If I couldn’t see that about the driver, how could I ever see that about myself? How could I claim my own perfection as God’s likeness, if I was unable to see the driver’s first?
I went home and kept thinking about these things. By now my leg really hurt. I hardly slept that night.
The next day, the leg was worse. I read the Christian Science Bible Lesson, and really studied it. The subject was “Doctrine of Atonement.” How appropriate! I needed to be more at-one with God and the fact that I was His loving, forgiving, and perfect idea.
I loved the Bible stories demonstrating God’s power in that Lesson. One of them was the account of Jesus’ healing of the woman who was bowed together for 18 years. It says, “When Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity” (Luke 13:12). It reminded me that I, too, could rely on the one powerful, omnipotent, loving God to always care for me.
Passages in the Lesson from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy were full of healing ideas. I liked this statement: “The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus’ time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation” (p. xi).
I saw that it was divine Principle, God, that would remove from my thinking any belief in the reality of sin (thoughtlessness or anger) and also of disease (including injury). Another passage in the Lesson said that I am one with God, and since God is eternal, infinite, incorporeal, perfect, then so am I and so is everyone, including the driver.
That night I felt forgiveness for the driver and a kind of euphoria over the fact that I really understood that I truly am a perfect, spiritual idea of God. I knew then that the physical healing had occurred. We never have to check matter to see if we are, in fact, healed. I then went to bed and fell fast asleep.
The next day I realized I had been walking around since the moment I got up that morning with no pain or discomfort in my leg. It was perfectly fine. I was grateful for this quick
healing.
Scarborough, New York, US
