I was skiing over a weekend, having a great time with my brother as we swooshed down trails of fresh powdered snow at Lake Tahoe. At one point, though, I fell down in a way that twisted my knee badly. I thought I was OK enough to ski down by myself, so after we had lunch, I encouraged my brother to continue skiing on his own.
However, after resting for a little while, I found I could barely stand, much less ski down to the lodge. With help, I was able to get onto the chairlift heading down. Three fellows from Ski Patrol were waiting for me at the bottom of the lift and carried me to the emergency room.
While the two nurses on duty kindly examined and bandaged my knee, they voiced numerous medical opinions. One said I had twisted my knee so badly that I wouldn’t be able to ski again; the other said I should expect to have surgery, and only with extended therapy would I have a hope of even walking normally.
Pills were offered to me as interim help, which I turned down, even though the pain was pretty intense, making it hard to think or pray.
After a while of feeling quite sorry for myself and my predicament, I began to rebel against those scary medical predictions when remembering Mary Baker Eddy’s advice on page 393 of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Take possession of your body, and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man.”
I asked for assistance to move from a bed to a chair, which placed me in a quieter section of the emergency room. From that moment on, the nurses never paid me one more second of attention. After a while, I took notice of a very large poster on the wall right in front of me. It was a photograph of one of those inviting scenes of an ideal mountain ski trail—a sparkling sunny day, a bright blue sky, white-powdered trees, and a hill with the fluffiest snow. It expressed perfection in every way. At this point I remembered what a Christian Science practitioner once said to me: “Yield to God’s perspective as the only reality, the only true report.”
The poster reminded me that, from a divine perspective, there was absolutely nothing in God’s creation that could possibly hurt a child of God. Nothing! How could any of the perfect ideas He created hurt another perfect idea—me! Impossible! There was only one true report of spiritual reality, and I found myself yielding to it, letting go of the bodily arguments that were trying to generate a different report, and I began praying.
About this time, my brother found me in the emergency room. He drove us to the cabin, helped me hop from the car to my room, and got me settled. During the night, my knee was very painful, so I gathered pillows from around the bed to support my knee, thinking this would ease the pain. For a time, that seemed to bring comfort, but the pain soon returned. This prompted me to remove every single pillow and reject the theory that one form of matter, however strategically placed, could bring comfort to another form of matter, which happened to be called a “knee.” I was realizing I had mistakenly attributed self-acting intelligence to matter.
Then the thought came to soak the knee in hot water, but as I had just rejected the temptation to try to find comfort in other material means, I put this idea behind me too.
In the morning I was still in pain, so I made a phone call to a Christian Science practitioner before we started on our car journey back home. The practitioner gave me a quote to ponder, from page 469 of Science and Health: “The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind—called devil or evil—is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality.” I began to think about the “truth that God, good, is the only Mind” utterly eradicating any belief that flesh and bones are self-acting.
This truth was my companion during the three-hour car ride back home. Although my brother had driven my car the whole way back, I knew I was healed when I heard myself say that I would drop him off at his apartment—realizing that this meant I could drive to my apartment on my own. And it was true! I was healed. My car was a stick shift, so I had to use both legs when driving 30 minutes to my home, which was an immediate proof of the healing.
By the way, there is an addendum to this healing. The following night my branch Church of Christ, Scientist, was electing new Readers. It just happens that the church edifice, where members vote, is across the way from a separate Sunday School building, where all the votes are tallied. I arrived that night to find my assignment listed as a “runner.” That meant I would go back and forth between the church and the Sunday School with voting information. It turned out to be one of those long evenings, where elections aren’t accomplished in the first vote, so I had plenty of “running” to do, but it was done in total freedom.
Eva Boone Hussey
Los Angeles, California, US
