A few years ago, while I was at a dental checkup, my dentist said he was concerned because there were deep pockets in the gums around my teeth. He asked that I come in for a teeth cleaning every three months, rather than a standard cleaning schedule of returning every six months. He said that if my gums continued to get worse, I would need medication and possibly surgery performed by a specialist to slow the gum decay. The dentist said that this decay is common as people get older. At the end of the appointment, I thanked the staff and headed home. I wasn’t going to buy into the commonly held belief that with age comes decay. For me, age is only a number, and my number is not listed in what God knows to be true about me.
When I first heard the diagnosis, I turned my thought wholeheartedly to God as to how to handle this situation. In the past, I’d always found healing when I relied on Christian Science prayer in any time of trouble, and I felt that this condition could be healed through prayer as well.
I began my prayers by exploring the seven synonyms that Mary Baker Eddy uses to define God in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love” (p. 587). I focused on ways in which God created me to express all the good qualities that these synonyms encompass.
