Some time ago I paddled an incredibly beautiful stretch of the Wisconsin River with a friend. The day was gorgeous, the wildlife abundant, and my new boat light and responsive. But that night, my arms hurt a lot. I couldn’t move without feeling pain.
At first, as I paced the floor, I felt I couldn’t even think enough to pray, because of the pain. But then I thought of something a Christian Science Sunday School teacher had once shared with me: “God is closer to you than your very breath.”
That’s pretty close. In fact, God and I—God and all Her children—are inseparable as Mind and its ideas. This truth comforted me. Right where the pain seemed so very real, there was the thought of God, Truth, correcting and destroying it.
As I prayerfully listened for more divine inspiration, I was able to quiet my own preoccupation with the pain. The pain had seemed so embedded in my consciousness that the realization that there was something truer and closer to me than the pain startled me and brought a sense of hope. I realized that there was a new conversation going on in my thought. It started as a glimpse of Truth that steadily grew. Godlike thoughts were more and more filling my consciousness, crowding out anything ungodlike.
Gone were my thoughts of blaming myself for not working out more and for agreeing to do the more difficult stretches of the boat trip on such a windy day. I realized that pain was not part of me at all. I was gaining a better sense of how God knows me: as a whole, strong, capable, spiritual being in whom pain has no part because pain is not a part of God, and I am created in Her image and likeness. I felt I was realizing this statement from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “God, the divine Principle of man, and man in God’s likeness are inseparable, harmonious, and eternal” (p. 336).
As my thought was transformed in this way, these spiritual truths dissolved my fear, and I felt calm. I saw myself as spiritual and harmonious, governed not by material law, but by divine law. Within moments, I was able to go to sleep. The next day, I was able to use my arms normally. All pain was gone.
With this healing, I felt that I experienced this promise from the Christian Science Hymnal:
I feel Thy touch, eternal Love,
And all is well again:
The thought of Thee is mightier far
Than sin and pain and sorrow are.
(Samuel Longfellow, No. 134)
I was so thankful for this healing—not just because the pain had gone, but because I was able to see that pain has no place or permanence in our true, spiritual being. How grateful I am to know that we don’t need to be manacled by pain, but that there is an answer: healing through prayer.
