Testimony of Healing June 29, 1907 Issue

Words are incapable of expressing our deepest thoughts...

Helen R. Platt

Words are incapable of expressing our deepest thoughts, and I pause reverently, thinking what I can say at this late day to declare my gratitude to God, the giver of all good, for my manifold blessings, and to show forth my appreciation of our Leader, the one who has labored so faithfully to make plain the way of salvation, to help us to understand the Principle of being, whereby peace and health can be attained here and now.

Nearly sixteen years ago I was compelled to resign the position I had held for several years, as art director of a college. As there was no perceptible sign of weakness, and my work showed no failures, the president of the college refused to accept my resignation until a second and more urgent request was made. My life had been a constantly busy one, as public school teacher and art director, and at this time sleeplessness was added to the supposedly hereditary liver and bowel trouble which compelled idleness. Leaving my college work, and after various experiences with friends and foes, I was advised by a doctor in New York city to try a celebrated rest-cure, in order to regain my normal condition. A strong belief in will-power had always sustained me in my work, enabling me to keep my ailments somewhat in subjection; but the sleeplessness, coupled with a serious nervous condition, now threatened my life. Half a year spent at the Springs gave no perceptible benefit. While there I was admonished to attend chapel exercises, the good man of the house saying, "God can do what doctors fail to do;" and he often said that he gave little or no medicine. Having prayed all my life,—more from habit than understanding,—I obeyed reluctantly. The nights were spent tossing on my bed; the days in taking baths, pouring out medicine, counting pellets, and anon sketching the people drinking from the sulfur pools. The best night's rest I had was once when after midnight I grew desperate, and reaching out in the dark for the medicine that my attendant had left, with the advice to take but little as it was very powerful, I drank from a glass nearly all its contents. I then slept till morning, an experience very unusual. Glancing at my table, I found the glass of medicine was untouched, while the glass of clear water was nearly empty, proving that as one thinks, so it is.

I had repeated the Lord's Prayer and the litany constantly through nights of agony, but God seemed so far away that often I would ask in despair, "Where is God?" None but myself ever knew the stifled ambition, disappointment, and anguish of soul I experienced during nearly two years of this purgatory, all these experiences forming a composite picture of pandemonium. In my case, however, man's extremity was truly God's opportunity, for after my return to Chicago Christian Science was thrust upon me by those who knew nothing of it personally, but they had friends who been healed of very peculiar ailments. After the third person accosted me, it flashed upon me that I had heard the words "Christian Science" about five years previous, while amongst the mountains with a sketching club, and the seed then dropped into thought was not lost. Finally a practitioner's name was given me, but nothing save enforced idleness could have driven me to make use of this God-given opportunity. Calling upon her with burdens which I thought were beyond her sympathy or power to remove, she remarked that God is able to help us in all our afflictions and trials and that she would give me treatment. She bowed her head, while I gazed upon her with the criticism that she was "only praying" for me; but soon the spirit of humility overcame my combativeness, and the power of that prayer erased a deep-seated and acute pain in my head, and this has never returned in these sixteen years.

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