It is with great appreciation that I am sharing this testimony about a complete and permanent healing of shingles through prayer alone.
One summer, my husband and I were traveling west from Michigan to Colorado, when I began experiencing painful symptoms of a rash on one side of my scalp and forehead. I jumped into the activities we were doing, such as white-water rafting, horseback riding, hiking, and biking, but the discomfort and pain increased.
When the rash spread down around my right eye, my husband, a practicing physician for 41 years, diagnosed the condition as shingles. I asked him to pray with me, and right then he sat down with me to read that week’s Christian Science Bible Lesson. We had attended family camp at a camp for Christian Scientists, and he had been going to some of the Bible Lesson study groups there, where he was welcomed and lovingly included in all the discussions. He had felt a genuine peace and love from the staff and participants, and he willingly joined me in consecrated prayer.
I also called a Christian Science practitioner. She reminded me that there is no root cause for disease—that Mind, God, is the only impulse. She said that just as electricity is conducted from a source, real transmission and messaging have a source: God, and only God. In the Bible Lesson that week, there was this passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: “Immortal ideas, pure, perfect, and enduring, are transmitted by the divine Mind through divine Science, which corrects error with truth and demands spiritual thoughts, divine concepts, to the end that they may produce harmonious results” (p. 259).
It was interesting to think about the verbs transmit, cause, and pass in the context of the Lesson my husband and I were reading together. My husband had briefly explained to me how Western medicine explains the transmission of shingles. I prayed to understand that the only transmission or communication was directly from God to man, including me! And that God does not send disease. All of me is innocent, pure, not sentenced to a virus.
Once, when Christ Jesus and his disciples encountered a blind man, the disciples asked, “Who did sin, this man, or his parents?” They wanted to find a reason for this condition. Jesus’ reply was that neither had sinned, “but that the works of God should be made manifest in him”—and then he proceeded to heal the man (see John 9:1–7).
I saw that this manifestation of God’s glory was as possible for me as it was two thousand years ago. Science and Health pointed the way: “The Christian Scientist, understanding scientifically that all is Mind, commences with mental causation, the truth of being, to destroy the error. This corrective is an alterative, reaching to every part of the human system” (p. 423).
After a couple of hours of reading, praying, and talking together, my husband and I fell asleep. The next morning, my husband declared, “You are healed!” Although the symptoms were still there, it was obvious to both of us that the skin condition had stopped spreading and had dried out.
I called the practitioner again, and she reminded me that the Christ, Truth, helps me to see myself only as a spiritual idea, not as a fleshly mortal. As the last vestiges of pain and lesions disappeared over the next couple of days, I joyfully sang these lines from a poem by Mrs. Eddy, which has also been set to music in the Christian Science Hymnal:
And o’er earth’s troubled, angry sea
I see Christ walk,
And come to me, and tenderly,
Divinely talk.
(Poems, p. 12)
I am truly grateful for this healing, for the prayerful attentiveness of the practitioner, and for my husband’s support of the prayerful approach taught in Christian Science.
Jennifer Hebert
Petoskey, Michigan, US
After prayer, not only did Jen’s rash immediately stop progression and start to fade, but it did so far better than could have been expected with antiviral medication. The rapid healing was not consistent with my 41 years of experience as a practicing internist. I am strongly led to believe that the prayerful intervention was very real and that I have much more to learn beyond traditional medicine.
Terrell Kent Hebert, MD
