Years ago when I was making the transition between my work with a local dance company and a new career, I had a healing of an inflamed and swollen eye. Although I was no longer officially working for the company, they would sometimes ask me to come to rehearsals and give notes about what needed improvement. One night, I went to a dress rehearsal for an important opening the next evening. The rehearsal was a mess. The dancers were under-rehearsed, the lighting was bad, the costumes didn’t fit—you get the picture.
Most of these things seemed impossible to change by the next evening, so I said the minimum and ran for the door. As I drove home, I was mentally ranting about how sloppy things were, and how that wouldn’t have happened while I was working there.
When I awoke the next morning, my eye was painfully inflamed and swollen shut. I called a Christian Science practitioner and asked her to pray for me. She asked me to study these Bible verses: “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:3–5).
I saw that there was a great big log in my eye and it was called criticism. As I prayed about facing that down, another verse came to me: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). I realized that I needed a single eye—a single way of seeing things. I needed to look out only from the standpoint of Spirit, the God who is Love, rather than bouncing back and forth between a material and a spiritual view. I began to pray deeply about seeing everything in that performance from God’s point of view, which is the only real view.
That night my husband and I went to the opening. My eye was still inflamed, but I didn’t think of it because I was truly enjoying the performance, striving to see everything about it as God’s expression of beauty, joy, and love. I could hardly believe it was the same group I had seen the night before. I was in awe of the way they had turned it all around. In retrospect, I know that I saw it differently because there had been a change of base in my own thought.
After the performance, we were invited to the cast party. I went into the bathroom, and when I looked in the mirror, my eye was completely normal. And there was no more pain.
I learned so much from this healing. It always reminds me of what Mary Baker Eddy wrote about Christ Jesus’ healing work: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 476–477).
Following Jesus’ example and striving to behold “in Science” God’s perfect expression, we find quick healing and deep joy.
Julie Ward
Cumming, Georgia, US
