Testimony of Healing May 18, 1907 Issue

In loving gratitude for the many blessings which Christian Science...

Anna Chambers Sunderman

In loving gratitude for the many blessings which Christian Science has brought into my life, I write this testimony. I cannot remember when I was not taking some kind of a remedy for some kind of a disease, up to the time I took my first treatment from a Christian Science practitioner, which is over eleven years ago. Since then I have taken nothing, not even a drink of hot water, as a remedy. I had become convinced that material remedies were useless in my case, which rendered me more fit to receive something "better, higher, holier" (Science and Health, p. 258), something which, besides giving me a God I could understand, has healed all my diseases. My mother relates that when I was an infant our home was burned to the ground one cold night in winter. She says I caught a cold that night which the combined efforts of the best doctors and the grandmas of the neighborhood could not cure. She also declares that thereafter the only season of the year when I was free from a cold was during the hot months. This I know, I coughed from my earliest recollections.

When I was about fourteen years old she became alarmed at my condition and took me to an eminent physician in Boston. After making a thorough examination he remarked that if he had been consulted when I was a child he might have cured me, as it was he could only prescribe something to relieve me when coughing violently. This prescription, which he handed my mother with many warnings, proved to be chloroform. Notwithstanding the fact that I was bundled in flannels the greater part of the time, and always doctoring, I continued to catch cold and to cough. It was not for this trouble, however, that I sought healing through Christian Science. The victim of an accident, I was brought very near to death's door, recovering only sufficiently to feel that death would have been preferable to such a state of existence. Nervous and spinal disease with a severe form of stomach trouble were just a few of the diseases from which I suffered.

The understanding gained through the study of the Christian Science text-book, in connection with the Bible, has made it possible for me to realize to such an extent what Jesus meant when he said, "Is not the life more than meat?" and "Nothing shall by any means hurt you," that I can eat anything that is set before me. I never asked help from a practitioner for relief from colds, feeling confident that this with other troubles would be overcome as I learned more of divine Truth. It was not overcome at once; some might call it slow to yield—but to me that phrase "slow healing" seems absurd when spoken of in connection with a malady which the doctors have pronounced incurable, and I am surely learning that just as soon as I am "ready for the blessing" (Science and Health, p. 570), I receive it. One lovely spring morning I awakened to the realization that I had not had a cold nor coughed all winter, and I believe I had been exposed to the cold more that winter than in all my life previous to this. Since that time, if such a suggestion comes to me, I think of what Mrs. Eddy tells us in Science and Health, p. 384, beginning with line 16, regarding "symptoms," and when I read her conclusion, "If you are a Christian Scientist, such symptoms are not apt to follow exposure," I ask myself, "Where art thou?" and a little time consecrated to God causes the unwelcome guest to depart. But the physical healing is the very least part of what I have to rejoice over, for whereas my body was always before my thought, it is now the farthest removed, while my time is occupied with trying to live aright, and to live aright we must think aright.

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