While walking my dog one winter morning, I slipped on an icy patch on our driveway and fell face-first on the asphalt. I was able to crawl to a dry area, stand up, and walk back inside, but my wrists and knee were in pain, and it was difficult to walk, bend my knee, or use my hands freely. Even standing up from a chair was challenging.
When the pain got worse later that day, I called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me. A statement she pointed out in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy was particularly helpful. This spiritual law must have undergirded Jesus’ flawless healing practice: “Under divine Providence there can be no accidents, since there is no room for imperfection in perfection” (p. 424).
In prayer I focused on spiritual truths such as my innate innocence as an expression of God, the certainty that God has never stopped caring for His children, and the supremacy of the divine law of good, which governs us all.
After a couple of days of study and prayer, it occurred to me that I had skimmed over the words “there can be no accidents.” I had read that statement so many times before; it just didn’t resonate with me at that moment. But in thinking more about it, I saw that I was putting effort into trying to heal the effects of an accident when I needed to understand more clearly that under God’s government, no accident had occurred in the first place.
If I believed that there was an accident and it caused pain and suffering, then I was believing that God must have allowed it to happen, since God is All. But in reality, God knows only good and governs His creation in perfect harmony. That is spiritual law. I had to decide if I was going to believe in a material universe ruled by chance and discord or understand spiritual reality—God’s reality—where accidents don’t exist and harm isn’t possible.
Science and Health says: “You cause bodily sufferings and increase them by admitting their reality and continuance, as directly as you enhance your joys by believing them to be real and continuous. When an accident happens, you think or exclaim, ‘I am hurt!’ Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real.
“Now reverse the process. Declare that you are not hurt and understand the reason why, and you will find the ensuing good effects to be in exact proportion to your disbelief in physics, and your fidelity to divine metaphysics, confidence in God as All, which the Scriptures declare Him to be” (p. 397).
The statement that we cause our own sufferings is startling, but I could see its truth. I had learned from my study of Christian Science that the belief in evil, whatever form it takes, originates in a material concept of ourselves. If we accept the false belief that there is a creating and governing power beside God, then that is what is manifested in our experience. Science and Health points out, “Your decisions will master you, whichever direction they take” (p. 392).
It’s not a matter of trying to convince a supposed human mind not to believe something that seems real and painful. It’s about rejecting the notion that we live at the mercy of material laws that can cause a sequence of grim events. Instead, we need to accept what right reasoning, from a spiritual standpoint, shows us to be true—God’s law of eternal perfection and harmony, which rules out the possibility of accidents.
Although there was daily progress, the full healing of the injuries didn’t happen until I realized that I was harboring a fear of slipping on the ice again. I was being overly cautious about walking outside and concerned that other adverse physical effects might appear in the future. As soon as I confronted these baseless lies and replaced them with what I had learned of God’s eternal perfection and care, the healing was complete and I was able to walk normally and confidently, without concern.
Robin Krauss
Hartford, Wisconsin, US
