Testimony of Healing October 19, 2015 Issue

True forgiveness heals

Name Withheld

I absolutely love the Lord’s Prayer and other spiritually strengthening prayers that I learned as a child. Growing up in a large family gave me many opportunities to put the Lord’s Prayer into practice and understand what each line truly meant to me, but I wasn’t as familiar with Mary Baker Eddy’s spiritual interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer until sometime during college.

I learned many lessons through my study of this particular prayer, together with its spiritual interpretation, especially the part that addresses forgiveness: “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. / And Love is reflected in love” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 17). Learning about true forgiveness has become an invaluable lesson in my practice of Christian Science. It has shown me that our true, God-given purity and goodness do not lessen; they never fall by the wayside and never cease to exist, because they have and always will constitute our spiritual identity as God’s beloved children.

For many years, I felt unable to forgive someone and thought it was impossible to fully comprehend what true forgiveness is and why it is important. When I was a young girl, I had been sexually abused by this individual. His actions had caused a level of fear in my life that seemed impossible to dispel. I was unsure how to make my parents or anyone aware of what had occurred, and I was fearful that somehow I would be punished because people would think I was at fault—that I had “let it happen.”

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