All through my childhood I suffered from chronic headaches. Their frequency was such that I could not go a month without needing to take medicines to calm the pain. During my last year of high school, in 1983, I missed the whole second quarter of school because of illness. The headaches had caused a severe loss of appetite, and I was losing my strength. I was often bed-stricken. Doctors did all kind of medical exams on me, but a scan of the brain showed no pathological problem. It was evident at that point that neither modern medicine nor traditional African medicine could heal me. Frankly, I thought that my only solution was to wait for death, and I hoped that it would put an end to my suffering.
At that moment, Christian Science came to my rescue. The discoverer of this Science, Mary Baker Eddy, quotes this proverb: “man’s extremity is God’s opportunity” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 266). My older sister and her husband had encountered a diagnosed infertility problem, and had decided to find a solution through prayer. They had seen marvelous results: they were able to conceive some time after they prayed with the help of a Christian Science practitioner. It’s therefore my older sister who advised me to try Christian Science. I felt much conviction in her words, so I decided without hesitation to turn to a Christian Science practitioner for help.
I remember that it was a day in March 1983. I met with the practitioner, and the first words that he shared with me gave me the impression that he may be mocking me! I felt frustrated in hearing him say: “Sickness does not exist... you are not sick,” when I was feeling just the opposite, and that my daily life had become unbearable to me. Seeing my skeptical face, the practitioner immediately started to open up my thought by explaining the true nature of man, created by God. He read to me these passages from the book of Genesis in the Bible: “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness... And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (1:26, 31). Then the practitioner prayed silently for me. When I left him, I felt relaxed. Coming home, I was surprised to find out that I owned the same Bible that the practitioner had used. Although I had been reading the Bible for a long time, I noticed that I had not understood much of it. This realization grounded deeply my new found desire to study and understand this book. I remember that at that very moment, any attraction I felt toward the thought of death vanished.
