One day after a period of vigorous hiking, I began to feel pain in my left knee. I had never had knee trouble before, and at first I just dismissed it with the thought that a little soreness would disappear with rest. However, on a subsequent hike the pain became so pronounced that on returning to the car I could take only a few steps at a time.
While I paused, I turned my thought wholly to God in prayer. I affirmed that my being was entirely spiritual and that I was never separated from the divine source of my health and strength. I also prayed to see that as God’s spiritual expression, I could never be in pain or experience a loss of any function.
When I arrived home, I called a Christian Science practitioner to pray for me. With her support, I continued praying daily to deepen my spiritual sense of being. During this time I needed to make some temporary accommodations to help me with movement, but I relied on prayer alone for the healing, which came slowly at first.
There were periods when the persistent discomfort and inconvenience seemed oppressive, but inspiration and joy were coming to me every day as I studied and prayed. I recognized that both the physical problem and the temptation to become discouraged about it were false beliefs—aggressive suggestions coming to my thought that I didn’t have to accept as real. Instead, I affirmed that God’s care for me ensured that I was never without the Comforter, divine Love.
There were times when I began to ask, Why is this condition not yielding? What am I missing that I need to know? The practitioner helped me realize that these were the wrong questions because they assumed that I was incomplete. The truth is that God is perfect, and as His reflection, I must also be perfect. Everything God made is complete, including my understanding of Him and of myself as His spiritual idea.
I studied and prayed with concepts presented in the chapter “Creation” in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. This helped me to reason purely from the basis of my preexisting and eternally protected completeness. I affirmed that in the divine Mind there is no concept of injury or pain, so I could never experience them. It was then that I understood that God, Spirit, is the source of my strength, and I could trust that truth to heal me.
I declared firmly that God was correcting and governing my thought, and that the inevitable outcome must be physical healing. I began to see that because God never knew of injury in the first place, it never actually existed as something real.
When I realized this, my faith was bolstered. I felt deeper trust in divine Truth, and I found myself claiming profoundly that any sense of ongoing pain was irrelevant to my being and that I had the spiritual strength to deny it and put it out of thought. I declared that my healing was already complete because I had never departed from harmony and immortality in the first place.
The pain began to diminish, and day by day I found greater mobility and freedom. Of course I was very happy to experience physical relief, but I was many times more elated over the spiritual ideas that were changing my thought.
Progress then came more rapidly, and in about four or five more days I had no need for material assistance. I was walking freely and without discomfort. At times fear of recurrence invaded my thought, but I was so prepared spiritually to detect and reject these false suggestions that they disappeared immediately.
It has been over a year since this healing, and I’ve continued to hike regularly with no return of the knee trouble. It is a healing that has taught me so much, and for which I am so deeply grateful. It has changed the way I pray every day.
Kenneth Hodina
MaCedonia, Ohio, US
