Over half a century ago, I was a student at a junior college in Illinois about 40 miles outside of Chicago. I played on the school’s baseball team. During the course of the baseball season, I developed painful sores in my mouth. I could eat only ice cream and drink milk. It also seemed impossible for me to sleep during a two-week period.
I lost a lot of weight, and it affected my playing. In one game I hit the ball and headed to first base but was easily tagged out. The coach of the team said it wasn’t like me to loaf and walk to first base. I replied that I was running as hard as I could, and I explained to him the condition in my mouth. When he saw it he was shocked and wanted me to report to the school doctors. I asked if it would be OK if I went to see our family dentist instead.
I made a dental appointment on Thursday, as I recall. This dentist had served in the United States Army during World War II, in the European Theater. He took one look inside my mouth and said, “You’ve got trench mouth.” He gave me a prescription for penicillin and asked me to come back early Monday morning. I took the prescription and left his office and headed for the drugstore.
I had been a student in the Christian Science Sunday School and knew that Christian Scientists relied on God for healing. Instead of filling the prescription, I went home and asked my dad what I should do. He simply said, “Call a Christian Science practitioner for help,” which I did. She lived in Chicago and asked me to drive to her house to see her on Friday night. When I got there, we talked for a few minutes about baseball, and then she said that I could expect to eat a full breakfast Sunday morning.
The practitioner’s confidence was based on what Christian Science teaches, that scientific prayer heals quickly and effectively. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy states: “The power of Christian Science and divine Love is omnipotent. It is indeed adequate to unclasp the hold and to destroy disease, sin, and death” (p. 412).
On Saturday morning I called the practitioner and said that nothing had changed in my mouth. She was still firm in her expectation of healing. She repeated, “You will eat a full breakfast Sunday morning.”
That Saturday night I began to pace the floor in my bedroom. Suddenly my bed looked very inviting. I lay down and slept 12 straight hours. I woke up Sunday morning and went into the bathroom. I reached for my toothbrush and toothpaste, something I had not done in weeks. I looked in the mirror above the basin and was flabbergasted. I brushed my teeth and looked again, and saw that all the sores had vanished. My mouth and gums were perfectly normal. I called the practitioner to tell her the good news, and then I ate a hearty breakfast.
I reported back to the dentist on Monday morning. He had put hypodermic needles on the dental tray next to the chair. When he saw that my mouth was clear, he said there would be no need for him to give me shots of penicillin.
I returned to the school baseball team, and after a few days the coach decided to put me into an extra-inning game. He asked if I was ready to go, and I said yes, although my bat felt like it weighed a ton of iron. I came to bat in the late inning, and as I stepped to the plate, I said to myself the first line of “the scientific statement of being”: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter” (Science and Health, p. 468). I realized that strength is not in muscles, and that God, Spirit, is the true source of strength.
I hit a long ball over the left fielder’s head. As I was rounding third base, the coach waved me in to go home. I thought that the left fielder must have dropped the ball. As I touched home plate safely, I looked out to left field and saw the left fielder still chasing the ball that had gone over his head. It was a home run.
I was always a scrappy player but never a power hitter. I had never hit a home run to left field in all my days of playing, and I never did it again. I’m convinced that hit was the result of prayer, of realizing that God, Spirit, was the only power. In appreciation of this wonderful healing, I joined my local branch Church of Christ, Scientist.
Ronald M. Hughes
Agoura Hills, California, US
