I had a significant healing while I was serving as a military chaplain. For all personnel serving in the United States armed services, periodic physical examinations are required. During such an exam, it was determined that I had a hernia. I was to go to a surgeon the next morning for further tests and evaluation. At the end of the day’s duties, I returned to my quarters and called a family member to help me through prayer.
To human appearance, I was a material person with a material ailment, all of which contradicted the truth of my spiritual individuality as the complete idea of God. I remember staying up most of the night in deep and consecrated prayer, striving to lift the burden of physicality from my thought. When the medical community, however good its intentions are, attaches a diagnosis to a personal sense of body, it seems pretty real. It was only by entirely divorcing my thought from a personal and material sense of body, and refusing to identify myself with this false sense, that I began to see that my only true identity was that of the man who is revealed in what Mary Baker Eddy calls the “Christlike understanding of scientific being,” which has as its basis “perfect God and perfect man” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 259). Throughout the night I prayed to see more clearly the absolute fact of perfection as the only basis of my being.
When I met with the appointed surgeon the next morning, he could find no evidence of the hernia. I still have the copy of the initial report showing evidence of the hernia one day, while the next day there was no such evidence.
