Testimony of Healing

PRAYER ENDS PAIN

On a warm summer day about eight years ago, a friend took our family boating on a lake.  At one point, I hopped on an inner tube attached to the boat for a ride around the lake.  Lying flat while I lifted my head to enjoy the scenery proved to be great fun.  With lots of laughter, I flew over waves and zoomed around jerky turns.

That evening, however, a painful neck problem developed.  Immediately I began to pray, immersing myself in thoughts of God's great love for me and all.  The beauty of the day, God's day, could not be tainted.  I knew the intense pain was not from God—and therefore, completely untrue. He had never for a moment let me slip out of His care.

Sticking emphatically to these ideas, I walked up and down the hall and persistently affirmed that I was not a material composite of nerves and muscles.  My spiritual identity as God's likeness didn't include anything that could be injured.  I listened for what God was telling me, rather than what the physical senses were trying to convince me of.  I knew that God, the source of my well-being, doesn't waver, and that I could trust that constant, reliable wholeness from Him was the only fact of my experience.

I tried to go to bed, but unable to find a comfortable position, I continued to pace the floor and pray.  It was gratifying to realize that the belief of pain could never stop the ever-active Christ-message of harmony and freedom that is always speaking to us.

At 3:00 a.m., however, when the pain had not subsided, I knew I needed additional prayerful support.  My cousin on the East Coast, a sincere student of Christian Science, was awake and ready to help.  She told me that she'd begin to pray right away.  Because I needed to sit down for a moment, I crouched with my knees and elbows on the floor.  I gingerly rested my head on the floor, too—and promptly fell asleep.  Half an hour later, I woke up, completely healed.  The pain had not just abated, it had vanished.  But more important, a holy sense of God's presence, gentle and sweet, remained.  This was the divine presence that I knew had been with me all along.

Another experience that enabled me to glimpse the unreality of pain occurred one afternoon when my daughter and I were moving a hammock stand.  I accidentally kicked one of the metal bars with my bare toes.  Tears flooded my eyes, but because I didn't want to disturb my daughter, I went into the house.  She followed me, however, and seeing my distress, threw her arms around me exclaiming, “Mom, I'll help you!”  That spontaneous affection, which I knew was an expression of God's love, lifted me immediately above the pain that had been so acute just moments before.  It went from intense to nonexistent!  There was some swelling, and I couldn't wear a shoe on that foot at first, but my daughter's caring support enabled me to feel the government of divine Love over me, which was entirely superior to any injury.  I continued to pray, and by that evening I was wearing both shoes and enjoying a wonderful walk.

On another occasion, I was suffering with a toothache.  My whole mouth hurt, and I couldn't bear to bring my teeth together.  I was on the way to a paint store, and as I drove, I sang and prayed with the third verse of a hymn from the Christian Science Hymnal:

In Thee I have no pain or sorrow,
No anxious thought, no load of care.
Thou art the same today, tomorrow;
Thy love and truth are everywhere.
                (Frances Fox, No. 154)

When I reached the store, a somewhat shabby-looking man opened the door for me.  We proceeded to the same aisle, and he struck up an interesting conversation about his oil painting.  Ashamed of my initial judgment of him, I quickly replaced it with a loving view of the man as a son of God.  By the time I left the store, I was free of the tooth pain.  And once again, an awesome Christly stillness filled my thought.  That simple act of dismissing a material outlook of one of God's children, in order to be receptive to the way divine Love knows its perfect creation, had brought healing.  There was never any recurrence of that tooth condition.

Mary Baker Eddy explained this mental transformation when she wrote, “As human thought changes from one stage to another of conscious pain and painlessness, sorrow and joy, --from fear to hope and from faith to understanding, --the visible manifestation will at last be man governed by Soul, not by material sense” (Science and Health, p. 125).

I'm grateful for all that I continue to learn about God's scientific law of good and its practical application, which gives profound meaning to life.

Susan Lee Gill
Maple Valley, Washington

Reprinted with permission from the Christian Science Sentinel March 26, 2007, page 25
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