The healing I’m about to share happened at a time when much anger was being expressed toward the place I worked and those who were working for that organization. I was very much aware of this. One part of my job required me to be in a rather isolated location, often with no other people nearby.
One day, I suddenly became very faint and felt as if I was losing consciousness. At that very moment, my wife, who also worked for the same organization, felt she should phone me. At first she thought, “Well, I’ll do it after I’ve done something else.” But then she thought, “No, I need to call right now,” and she was obedient to this spiritual intuition.
When I picked up the phone, I told my wife I didn’t know what was happening to me but that something was wrong. She then got in touch with my manager, and before long they were both at my side. Meanwhile, I had managed to phone a Christian Science practitioner.
My wife and manager helped me down to our car, and my wife drove us home. I was still pretty woozy but was beginning to feel more like myself. Once we got home, I rested for the remainder of the afternoon. That evening I was feeling well enough to go with my wife to our church so that she could practice reading the Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly with her fellow Reader.
After going to bed, we got a phone call in the middle of the night. I answered it, and the voice on the other end of the line said, “You’re going to die.” My wife asked me what the caller had said, and I sleepily repeated the message. She started vigorously praying out loud, affirming God’s ever-presence and protecting power, and she had me call the practitioner to report this specific threat.
When I talked to my wife about this later, she said she recalls emphatically affirming the allness of God, good, and the nothingness of evil, and saying something she’d heard a Christian Scientist mention, that “mental malpractice” is actually “no one, nowhere, doing nothing to nobody.”
Mental malpractice is a term Mary Baker Eddy uses a number of times in her writings. In her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, she says: “All mental malpractice arises from ignorance or malice aforethought. It is the injurious action of one mortal mind controlling another from wrong motives, and it is practised either with a mistaken or a wicked purpose” (p. 451). And in other places in her writings, she is quick to state that mental malpractice cannot in reality harm us, but that the belief that we can be harmed must be challenged.
So I knew that dealing with the concept of malpractice didn’t need to be spooky or mysterious, but that it was necessary to defend myself mentally from malice, impositions about my good work, or anything else that would seem to interfere with my safety and oneness with God, divine Love.
That night, my wife continued to state and know that God is all good and the only Mind and power, so “there is no power apart from God” (Science and Health, p. 228). Soon, we both went back to sleep.
I was able to return to work the next day. When my wife reported the whole story to her manager, we found out that I wasn’t the only one from the organization recently to have had to face such an experience. We continued to pray, and I’m grateful to say that I experienced no more threatening phone calls and no more fainting spells. And I continued to work safely at the organization for many years after this.
Although I don’t remember precisely which metaphysical truths my wife and I were praying with during this time, I’m sure this favorite Bible verse, or one like it, was included in our prayers: “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness” (Isaiah 41:10).
I am so thankful that no matter how frightening the circumstance might seem, we can turn to God, divine Love, the only power, and find safety and protection.
Frank Lloyd Smith
Williamsburg, Virginia, US
