One evening last summer, I was with our three kids on a road trip. We’d had a bonfire with friends that night, and although we’d made a point of wearing long pants and long sleeves, our five-year-old had many bug bites around her ankles. She woke in the middle of the night in great distress, screaming and scratching.
My efforts to pray out loud and comfort her with hymns and assurances of God’s love seemed totally ineffective. Then, a line from Mary Baker Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures came to thought: “The wind had not changed, but her thought of it had. . . .” It is from a healing account in which the author gave Christian Science treatment to a woman with lung disease who believed she had difficulty breathing when the wind blew from the east. Eddy sat beside the woman’s bed and prayed silently for a few minutes, and the woman was healed.
The full line and the rest of the passage reads: “The wind had not changed, but her thought of it had and so her difficulty in breathing had gone. The wind had not produced the difficulty. My metaphysical treatment changed the action of her belief on the lungs, and she never suffered again from east winds, but was restored to health” (pp. 184–185).
