It was a beautiful spring day in April of 2010. When I woke up that morning, I couldn’t imagine wanting to reconnect with the Church of Christ, Scientist, the Church I had willingly left as a young mother and housewife some fifty years before.
As a child, I had been raised in Christian Science and told how God would heal all my ills, but I had a problem. We lived in Chicago, and I struggled with many seasonal allergies and other minor, but annoying, health issues for which I felt I had never found healing. When I married and moved to California, I was thinking of myself as a “failed” Christian Scientist. Shortly thereafter I stopped thinking about myself as any kind of a Christian Scientist. In 2010 I was living in a small Missouri farm town, nine years after the passing of my second husband.
On that April day I was feeling youthful, healthy, and somewhat bemused that I had attained a “ripe old age.” I realized that although I had “left” the Church some fifty years before, I hadn’t felt the need to consult a doctor about my health. Then I was startled to realize that I hadn’t suffered from seasonal allergies for twenty-five years. I started to wonder if my early study of Christian Science had, unbeknownst to me, been protecting me.
