Though I was raised in a home where my parents knew of Christian Science, it was not practiced, and I grew resentful of it. Despite the marvelous things I knew about it, I blamed my parents and Christian Science for my unhappy life. The home was far from harmonious, and I was often sent to a friend’s house to seek refuge. After a number of heartbreaking circumstances in which I became the victim, it finally came to me to pick up Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. I began a reading of it which lasted weeks. When I finished the book, then I would begin again. I often got up early, and read all day and late into the early-morning hours.
I was changed with this reading and the new spiritual understanding it gave me. My concepts about myself and everyone around me were different from then on. My excruciating shyness, timidity, and feelings of degradation lessened greatly. The Christ blazed into my thought from almost every page of the book. I had not known what the Christ meant, but it became so clear that it seemed as if the pages of the textbook had been written entirely for me.
Through a few unusual steps, I was inspired to request that my parents let me go to work for The Christian Science Monitor in Boston because when I was younger, I had visited The Mother Church and I’d never forgotten it. As I was preparing the night before leaving, I shared with a friend some truths of Christian Science and recall thinking to myself, “You are going to have to prove some of these things.”
