Shortly after graduating from college, I developed a pessimistic outlook on many areas of my life. I felt I didn’t need Christian Science and had stopped attending church years earlier. I was out on my own and enjoying the freedom of young adulthood—until I noticed a lump on my neck. It absolutely terrified me; I worried about it constantly.
At the time, I felt totally responsible for my health, my happiness, and everything else in my life. I was convinced I had all the answers and left God entirely out of the picture. I had a swollen sense of self, and I knew it. I reasoned that this might be the cause of the swelling in my neck. Although I tried to pray about the bloated sense of self, my motive was only to dissolve the lump, not to understand my genuine selfhood as God’s spiritual idea.
Five years later I still hadn’t experienced healing. I realized I was thinking about the growth in my neck daily, often more than once. I started to do the math and calculated how many hundreds of times I had let my belief in the reality of the lump go unchecked—despite having learned in Christian Science that God did not create evil, and so disease is an illusion, not a fact.
