Question 2: Share a testimony other than physical healing in which reading one or more of Skip’s articles had played an important part in your own spiritual study and prayer and final demonstration.

Through the years, quite a few of Skip’s articles have helped me with family relationships, challenges at work, and financial hardships, but the most beautiful demonstration has been my marriage. As anyone who has been married knows, many challenges that you face in a marriage require patience, kindness, sacrifice, compromise, selflessness, and unconditional love. 

Skip talked with both of us before we entered marriage, as we were both his students. He told us that the best relationship you can have with your spouse is that of a practitioner. In our marriage we came to learn more and more what that actually meant, and we would work for one another when we faced health issues or personal problems. We also learned what it meant to work for the marriage itself. 

Early in our marriage, my husband and I had to learn how to communicate with each other. We had challenges with staying calm during disagreements, and many times we ended up yelling at each other and saying hurtful things. Through Christian Science, we learned to be quiet and walk away during these disagreements, to go and do our spiritual work, and to let God communicate to each of us what needed to be said. 

Several of Skip’s articles were particularly helpful during times of challenge in our marriage. “No last straws” (Sentinel, September 17, 1984) taught us both that there was no circumstance or disagreement that could separate us from God’s love and ultimately, each other’s love. These sentences from that article describe it best: “As we go forward in prayer to understand the allness of our God, we find good ahead of us, awaiting us, and around us. And this good isn’t simply what we can channel through ourselves, so to speak. It is in accord with the divine law that ‘all things work together for good to them that love God.’” 

“Are we selfishizing or are we ‘walking in the light of God’?” (Sentinel, August 21, 2017) was especially helpful to me in working about the idea of personality. It helped me to let go of a sense of being wronged by a personality and to let love flow in where that hurt seemed to be. In this article, Skip writes, “Mrs. Eddy saw the varied forms of personal sense to be the very opposite of Christian Science, and that which would hold back the natural growth and progress of the Church she founded. She knew these stubborn impressions would yield to the love and natural unity that pour through churches and families, and carry the whole Cause of Christian Science forward, as they are doing today.” This helped me to see my husband in the light of Love rather than personality. It was not always easy to let go of “stubborn impressions,” but because it was a continuous labor of Love and unselfing, it became natural to see my husband as the perfect child of God. 

Some of the other articles that helped our marriage were “Thinking right and ‘thinking otherwise’” (Journal, March 1992), “No ‘good reasons’ for fear” (Sentinel, June 22, 1987), and “What God knows” (Sentinel, December 16, 1991). From these articles we learned that when we went to God in prayer and gave Christian Science treatment for each other and our marriage, there was in fact harmony instead of discord, love instead of anger, patience instead anxiety and fear, selflessness instead selfishness, kindness instead of hurtfulness, health instead of sickness. As the years passed, we learned to provide tender and unselfish care for each other, and I can genuinely say that everyone who has witnessed our love for each other has said that it is beautiful. As Mrs. Eddy wrote in her chapter on marriage, “Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love” (Science and Health 57:18–19).