After church one Sunday, my husband was playing with our daughter, who was about two at the time. At one point he was swinging her around, and when he brought her down to the ground, her foot hit the cement very hard. She didn’t seem hurt at first, but whenever she tried to take a step after that, she would whimper and sit down.
We immediately began praying for our daughter as we finished our outing with family. There was no evidence of injury, but she still wasn’t walking after an hour, so we called a Christian Science practitioner when we got home. The practitioner reminded me of when I played soccer in college, and how I wasn’t deterred by injury. The practitioner said I would bulldoze error (anything opposed to God, good) in my prayer and action, and that’s exactly what I needed to do now—I could not be afraid for my daughter. This made me laugh, and was strengthening.
After getting off the phone, I opened my Bible at random to this phrase: “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” This immediately uncovered a feeling I’d been harboring for the past hour: that my husband was partially to blame for our daughter’s injury, that he hadn’t been wise or careful enough. I read the phrase again in context from the book of Jeremiah: “This shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (31:33, 34). I related “the least of them unto the greatest” to my husband and daughter—that God sees them as equally innocent and pure.
