“Impelled is the word that describes why I read Science and Health at this time.”

A couple of months ago, I was reading the Lesson and a citation in Science and Health interested me, so I read a little further in the book. I ended up finishing that chapter and going on to the next one. I was finding things that I really wanted and needed to know about. I finished the book, then went back and did the first part up until the place I’d started.

It didn’t go very fast. I read all day without doing anything else for a couple of weeks.

A short time after I started reading, I was struck by the fact that Christian Science is actually a lot more serious than I’d been thinking. It is impossible to stay still or to rest in matter. I have to go forward. Also I could see more clearly the intensity of the resistance to Christian Science or Truth. And I had forgotten the startling beauty that comes at the end of “The Apocalypse.” That was a surprise. 

Impelled is the word that describes why I read Science and Health at this time. I didn’t plan to do it. In some ways it wasn’t a “good” time for it. I was quite ill, constantly dizzy so I couldn’t even be propped up a lot of the time, having unpredictable attacks and some ongoing effects from the force of them. But I found that I really wanted to read it right then. I wasn’t reading the book and giving myself treatment as I went, and I wasn’t “applying” the ideas. I was just listening to the book. And the book felt like a friend, a dear and precious helper. I wasn’t working with a practitioner, but I felt that in reading it I had the help I needed. The attacks became less frequent, and the effects of them were healed. Then they stopped and the rest of it stopped too.

It’s a demanding book—I had to stay alert. But like the writing of it, my experience reading it was “sweet, calm, and buoyant with hope, not selfish nor depressing” (S&H 109:15).

This experience has given me a lot to think about and seems to be coloring all my thoughts right now. I don’t have many conclusions yet, just “more God in the work.” Most of the ideas are still coming to the surface. Now there is mostly an increased sense of God’s presence and power—of being in God’s care, under His direction. And that’s not a little or generic sort of thing, but has Life to it.