Testimony of Healing July 1, 1939 Issue

In 1918, when I was learning to fly, I had an experience...

Ellwood M. Harris

In 1918, when I was learning to fly, I had an experience for which I shall always feel very grateful. This experience has been of inestimable value in proving that the truth learned at Sunday school in the study of the Lesson-Sermons in the Christian Science Quarterly, is a staff on which to lean.

The newness of flying and the lack of satisfactory parachutes may have contributed somewhat to a situation where aggressive mental suggestion, superstition, and so forth, received wide acceptance by those not seeing it for what it was. At this stage flying instruction was on a "production basis." Each flying officer instructor had six cadets assigned or posted to him, one of whom he was to graduate solo, that is, send him up to fly an airplane alone, not later than Saturday of each week. Needless to say, most of the instructor's time was spent with the cadet whom he expected to graduate, which meant that only a portion of the flying instruction was spread over the first five weeks, and the rest of it during the last week. In this respect my experience was a little out of the ordinary. Nine days before I was scheduled to go solo, the cadet immediately ahead of me, who was to go solo on Saturday, received a minor injury to his hand on the Thursday morning before, and had to be excused temporarily from flying and other duties. This meant that I, being next in line, would have to learn in two days what I had expected to have nine more days to accomplish.

I worked vigorously all day Thursday and Friday, striving for a realization of the protection to which I felt I was entitled as a child of God, but I did not receive that sense of peace which attends demonstration.

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