“Each time whatever was most feared would not come to pass.”

My Mom was in the hospital for six months. Surgery went wrong. Picture alarming.  I believe she thought the claim of disease was too big to handle through prayer. I did not dwell on the why.  It should have been an in and out surgery. It wasn’t.

My starting point was that Mom loves Science, and she had taught me to pray and she loves the simplicity of the Truth, so I knew she would expect me to turn to Science.

I and other family members and church friends spent a lot of time by her bed praying, reading, affirming that no experience was out of God’s control. I had a practitioner working for me to give me support. The story of Nehemiah was in the lesson. Like Nehemiah, I refused to come down from the wall, from seeing only the perfect man expressed. I read through the recent anthology of periodical articles, studying and underlining, sometimes reading to my Mom even if she was not conscious. We did what ever we were led to, singing hymns often. Each time there was an alarming report, and a decision regarding Mom’s care had to be made, I started with man’s true spiritual selfhood, knowing that matter so called laws could not interrupt that being. Each time whatever was most feared would not come to pass.  One of the ICU nurses loved the atmosphere in her room and acknowledged prayer was helping my Mother and asked to be assigned to her even when she was supposed to be off shift.

Mom pulled through this phase and we finally got her home to continue her recovery and deal with the belief of a lingering severely painful skin condition she contracted while in the hospital. For this, the doctors said there is no cure. We knew otherwise. Around this time, I think it was October, I called you for guidance.  You encouraged me to be less timid in my prayers about this. (I had been struggling with the “is this treatment, am I supposed to be doing this? Am I making things worse?” questions).  After talking to my Mom about what you had said, we asked a practitioner to pray for this challenge. She came and read to Mom every day for a week. Because Mom was using painkillers, this loving practitioner felt she could not give treatment but aimed to uplift my mother’s thought. This week was a turning point, and for the first time in about five months Mom had some pain-free times, and could start to take up her usual activities. Her recovery has been steady ever since. She has rejected the wheelchair, walker and even now her home-care worker’s arm.  She remembers very little of her early time in the hospital except times when the family was reading the lesson and articles. This is a blessing. She says of the pain, which continues to lessen that the only thing that really ends it is the practitioner’s work.

About the same time, I had to meet my own challenge. I was feeling pain in my breasts, and something felt not right. I was dealing with fear of what this could be. I have to admit that I might have gone and got it checked out, but the experience with my mother was giving me reason to put my whole faith in Science. I worked with a practitioner, studying the chapters “Recapitulation” (especially What is mind?), “Science of Being”, “Christian Science Practice”, hungrily reading periodicals. When fear was tempting me, I just focused on something simple, God’s love, read Psalm 23, the Lord’s Prayer, or sang Mrs. Eddy’s hymns.

We stayed home from our family vacation so I could visit Mom in the hospital. My husband arranged for my mother-in-law to come and help with our son, so I could spend time in my own study and with my Mom. What an uplifting time it was. I worked with too many citations to recall each, but I became more clear about life being spiritual not material. I was tired of being fearful about various claims or conditions of the body, and my desire was to reach a point where I could maintain a sense of spiritual poise when faced with such suggestions. Within three days there was marked lessening of the pain, and I for the most part stopped checking the body for improvement. This gave me the proof I needed to keep working. I studied Kimball’s collected letters. They are a reminder of the power of treatment. I affirmed this was the case and I felt I could ask the practitioner to stop treatment. I am not sure when it was that I knew I was healed, but the fear left and pain with it. When the pain seemed to return, I would dismiss it as simply a suggestion and I had the choice not to welcome into my experience.

One beautiful passage I worked with is in Misc. Wr. Page 82: “Immortal Mind is God, immortal good; in whom the Scripture saith ‘we live, and move, and have our being.’ This Mind, then, is not subject to growth, change or diminution, but is the divine intelligence or Principle, of all real being; holding man forever in the rhythmic round of unfolding bliss, as a living witness to and perpetual idea of inexhaustible good.”

During the period I saw other physical healings. For instance, I was bracing for the seasonal illnesses that had been a challenge for our family throughout the previous winters (much is said of this in connection with families with young school kids). But when one bout of cold in the fall seemed to intrude, I just kept with my work knowing that as Truth is an alterative in the entire system, that the prayer I had been engaged in must necessarily bring health to my whole human experience, and that of loved ones. This bout ended quickly and there was no more all winter or spring.