Testimony of Healing April 28, 2014 Issue

Toothache gone

Dean Coughtry

About the middle of August 2011, I found myself reading the weekly Christian Science Bible Lesson with unusual eagerness. The ideas from the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, were leaping off the page in a persistently engaging way, and I pondered them constantly throughout the week. Especially compelling was this thought from the chapter of “Recapitulation” in Science and Health: “The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind—called devil or evil—is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality.” The paragraph continues, “We bury the sense of infinitude, when we admit that, although God is infinite, evil has a place in this infinity, for evil can have no place, where all space is filled with God” (p. 469).

That Saturday morning, I woke up with a dreadful toothache, became uneasily anxious about the possible prospect of constant suffering stretching out ahead of me, and began to mourn the loss of my day. But immediately I sat up in bed and turned toward those scientifically Christian truths from the Lesson, or perhaps they “turned toward me” and we met in the middle! I could not help myself—the words spoke meaningfully to me of the allness of God and the nothingness of anything unlike good.

I faced these glowing truths squarely for a few minutes, with no sense of trying to get anything, or change anything, and after a few minutes of prayer in this way I was gratefully surprised, and delighted, when the pain suddenly vanished. Only a very small, insignificant sense of discomfort remained, which faded out over the course of that day and didn’t come back. This seemed to me a clear example of a joyful biblical promise fulfilled, “Before they call, I will answer” (Isaiah 65:24).

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