This past winter, my husband and I traveled to the Caribbean for a vacation with my brother and sister-in-law. In the afternoon on the third day, while swimming in a pool, I started to feel dizzy and nauseous. I decided to go back to my room, and as I made my way back, I started to experience stomach pain. I was in a lot of discomfort.
I stayed back from dinner that night to address this physical challenge head on through prayer. I first addressed the belief that food could have power over me. We were at an all-inclusive resort, which meant all the food was included in the price of the stay. While this perk was fun at first, it made it easy to over-indulge and ascribe too much power to food.
I started to pray to get a clear understanding of a statement in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, in a section describing a healing of indigestion through Christian Science. The statement reads: “Food had less power to help or to hurt him after he had availed himself of the fact that Mind governs man, and he also had less faith in the so-called pleasures and pains of matter” (p. 222). I started to realize how silly the whole concept of intelligent matter really is, as it claims to possess both good and bad qualities—sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful. It was becoming clearer to me that anything discordant could not be a part of me because it was not included in my relation to God.
