Injured wrist restored

Something appeared to go terribly wrong between the moment I lunged after the ball in a tennis match and when I came to my senses on the ground. My friends helped me up and asked if I was all right. I told them I was, though I was actually feeling a great deal of pain in my chest and a wrist.

I spent a few moments gathering my thoughts and affirming a spiritual fact that has supported me during many personal trials: that as God’s perfect child, I can never be separated from Him or outside of His control. This calmed my fear, and as the fear dissipated, so did some of the discomfort. 

In an effort to allay any concerns my partners might have had, I finished the match. Then I left for home so I could pray for myself and contact a Christian Science practitioner to pray for me too. 

The practitioner was a big help. There was no sense of alarm on her part, just calm assurance that since God is Spirit and all-harmonious, He is incapable of either experiencing an accident or producing one. Therefore, what I had experienced was nothing more than a suggestion that chance or a random force could overpower God’s care for me. The impossibility of this suggestion was evident to me right away, and as soon as I acknowledged its fallacy, the pain in my chest vanished and never returned. Feeling that freedom from all of the remaining symptoms was imminent, I told the practitioner I would continue to pray on my own. 

However, the difficulty with the wrist persisted. I prayed daily to see that this problem was no more of a false suggestion than the chest pain had been, and therefore it couldn’t be more difficult to cure. But in this case, there appeared to be more to clear up in my thought. I had experienced a skiing accident years earlier in which I had severely injured both of my wrists. In fact, I thought they might have been broken, though I never had them X-rayed. It had taken weeks to regain the full and painless use of them, but the healing had been complete and was accomplished entirely through reliance on prayer. 

The tennis incident rekindled memories of that experience. As I prayed for more clarity about God’s unceasing care for me and all of His children, it became apparent that if I was going to see this accident as a false and unreal suggestion, I had to see every accident as such, no matter when it happened or whom it involved. With this acknowledgment there was more improvement, but some of the symptoms and pain remained. 

About five weeks after the incident on the tennis court, I read the following in an issue of the Christian Science Sentinel, in an article titled “Justification”: “In criminal law, if a man charged with an offense can prove an alibi, he is at once acquitted; for it is self-evident that no one can be in two different places at the same time” (Ira W. Packard, May 10, 1913). It dawned on me that if I had always been God’s perfect son, made in His likeness and dwelling forever in His kingdom, I could never have been an injured mortal, for that was not His likeness. In fact, my true spiritual identity could never have been at the scene of an accident, because I was always snuggled securely in God’s embrace, under His control, governed by His law of harmony, and never separated from Him. 

This thought was totally liberating to me. The logic was so obvious that the thought of injury vanished entirely—and instantly! The condition was healed, and there has not been a tinge of pain or restricted movement from that time forward. 

While my gratitude overflows for this and many other healings I’ve experienced through prayer, I am even more grateful for the expanded understanding of man’s real identity that Christian Science has given me. This expansive, spiritually based understanding gives me the confidence and assurance that, as Jesus said, “All things are possible to him that believeth” (Mark 9:23).

Brian Webster 
Ballwin, Missouri, US