I was a doubting Thomas. To me, Christian Science was this “weird religion” I could never accept. And yet I’d seen it work.
In my youth, on a choir trip to Ensenada, Mexico, one of the group members was kicked by a horse. The injury was pretty ugly—either a broken bone or a badly bruised ankle at the very least. The injured girl was a Christian Scientist, and she asked to not be taken to the hospital. Instead, she wanted us to call her mother, which we did. Cell phones hadn’t yet been invented. I was asked to call her mom, and I relayed the conversation back and forth between them. The essence was that her mom told her she was perfect—God’s child and uninjured. The next morning she joined us for breakfast and had no apparent difficulty walking, and she enjoyed the rest of the trip.
A few years later I met and married a Christian Scientist. I was in the military and was sent off to a remote site in Alaska. Before I departed on the assignment, my wife stocked my bag with Christian Science-related books. There was a biographical trilogy on Mary Baker Eddy by Robert Peel, The Christian Science Way of Life by DeWitt John, the Bible, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and Prose Works, a collection of other writings by Mrs. Eddy. I promised to read and study all of those books along with a bunch of other pamphlets and literature—it was a one-year assignment.
