One night several years ago I woke up with an excruciating pain in my side. It felt as if something had ruptured inside my body. I wasn’t comfortable either lying down or sitting, so I paced my house for the rest of the night, praying to understand that this pain was not a part of the perfect, healthy man whom God created, but was a lie that I could refuse to believe.
In the morning I called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me. Very soon the pain started to lessen. But for the next few days I was still unable to sleep, and the pain was now accompanied by a rash that kept growing near the right side of my stomach.
It was very hard to concentrate on anything because of the pain, but the practitioner encouraged me to repeat to myself Mary Baker Eddy’s “scientific statement of being.” It begins, “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter” (Science and Health, p. 468). I knew that this was a fact—a spiritual law—and that God was the only creator and lawgiver, regardless of what the body was indicating.
