Not long after I went into the public practice of Christian Science, I got a call from a woman who had experienced immediate relief when she had asked me to pray for her the day before. She was so pleased that she now wanted me to treat a list of long-standing ailments. Sure of God’s love, I prayed diligently about each concern. After a week, she told me that things weren’t much better and that I should stop working for her.
Going over the way I had prayed, I could honestly say that the ills on her list didn’t seem any greater to me than the problem she had first called about. I had gone to work, believing that God was God—omnipotent, omnipresent, the supreme authority, who had not created pain or disease. And yet there was no evidence of healing.
Dismayed, I told an experienced Christian Science practitioner what had happened and asked for advice. He replied that it was a mistake to assume that no good had been accomplished, saying that the leaven of Truth, God, was at work and that earnest, honest prayer is never in vain. But he added that if there was a failure on my part, it might have been in having “too conventional a sense of what the Christian Science practice is.” After I puzzled over that remark for a couple of days, I went to the dictionary.
