Question 1: Share a physical healing or healings in which reading one or more of Skip’s articles played an important part in your own spiritual study and prayer and ultimate healing.

From the very first, it was Skip’s articles that made me want to have him as my teacher. The biggest message I got from his articles, over and over, was that I can’t do anything by starting with a personal mind and trying to make that personal mind see the truth, know the truth, and be generally good.

It doesn’t work. I can’t start there.

I have to start with the one Mind and know that it is my Mind. That’s the fundamental basis of everything. It has opened up vistas that I had never seen, despite growing up in a Christian Science household, going to Sunday School, and reading the Lesson.

The article that has meant the most to me is “What is scientific Christianity?” (Journal, April 1988). I read it over and over when I was going through a period of mental imbalance. In that article, Skip describes the healing of a friend who was suffering from a mental condition that seemed very similar to my own. Here is what Skip wrote:

“[My friend] had let anxieties about certain things build up over a period of years. At one point, when things seemed the worst they’d ever been, her husband called a Christian Science practitioner on her behalf….My friend had felt she was drowning in fear, and too crazy to even be able to say what the problem was, but she hung on the telephone and listened.

The practitioner said to her, ‘Think with the Love that is God. You don’t have to think about whatever it is that seems so awful. Just think with Love.’ He told her she could begin by thinking about someone she loved and everything she loved, and he explained that would break the mesmerism. [She] did this, but it wasn’t until later that she realized how she had been healed of the longstanding trouble. It wasn’t because she made a human effort to think of pleasant things to take her mind off an actual problem. It was because thinking with Love was expressing in thought the love of Love, God’s love, honestly, clearly, confidently, systematically. And because that kind of love was coming from God and was omnipresent,…it lifted her above the dream of life in matter, gave a new view of her own relationship to God, and healed her.”

This article helped me to get above the belief of mental imbalance, although it took some time and a lot of support from a few practitioners. But the sense, which was reinforced in class, that we only get traction when we start with God as Mind and don’t try to make a personal, mortal mind think the right thoughts, has grown over time and helps with healing.