First Church of Christ, Scientist, Ashland, OR

I badly injured my leg in a fall while running down a hill. The difficulty was not medically diagnosed, but it was similar to that of other dancers I knew whose injuries had permanently prevented them from dancing. The Christian Science practitioner who was praying with me for healing suggested that a particular citation from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy would help. The sentence reads, “The divine Science of man is woven into one web of consistency without seam or rent” (p.242). I pondered that sentence in regard to my case for quite some time. Four months later, in the middle of the night, when I wasn’t thinking about my leg, all of the work and prayer during that period finally led to the inspiration that healed me. In a flash, I saw that I could never be torn away from God. I knew I was healed. When I rose in the morning, my ability to hop, skip, jump and dance proved my midnight insight to be true.

Once I had an irritating skin condition over most of my body. At the time, I was working on a project that was intended to benefit students from around the world. It required lots of work by many dedicated people. Working with some of these “mental giants,” I often found myself feeling inadequate. In praying about the specific task I’d been assigned, I turned repeatedly to one particular Bible verse in Psalms: “As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.” I needed to wake up to the fact that I was (and am) God’s likeness. This lifted my thought to a more spiritual level. And after many days of looking, through prayer, into God’s “face”–not some person’s–for affirmation of worth and satisfaction, I realized that the skin condition was gone. I not only felt satisfied–I felt inspired. My appearance even improved. Friends I hadn’t seen for a while asked what had happened to me.

One morning I woke up with a deep hunger for more spiritual understanding. I also felt a sore throat coming on, so I decided to concentrate more on the first need and put the physical problem on the back burner. As I prayed, I was impelled to re-read the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, as well as the events leading to that wonderful demonstration of God’s love and power. (See chapter 11 of John’s gospel.) I became so absorbed in it that I forgot about the sore throat. I felt that same love and power enveloping me. I then coughed, and felt something coming up out of my throat. When I went to spit it out in the bathroom sink, I discovered it was a piece of flesh, like some kind of small tumor that had been removed surgically–but without human hands or knife. I didn’t know it had been there as I hadn’t felt anything until that morning when I’d wakened with the discomfort in my throat. All I can say is that I’d experienced the laser-like precision of spiritual light in my thought as I pondered the raising of Lazarus, and that that light was manifested in a tangible way in the perfect removal of something that didn’t belong in my body. It reminded me of St. Paul’s declaration in his epistle to the Hebrews (4:12) that “the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”