Testimony of Healing May 21, 1910 Issue

Years ago, while taking a course in Bible study, I read...

Florence Goucher

Years ago, while taking a course in Bible study, I read Joel ii: 23-26 and market it "My promise." At that time I had never even heard of Christian Science, but I believed that there were promises in Bible for every need, and this promise suited my particular needs. For ten years I had been a victim to epilepsy, shut up at home and watched continually every way I turned. The winter I was seventeen years old I was told that if I did not soon get relief I would lose my mind, and night after night I kept myself awake, dreading lest the fatal stroke should come while I was asleep. At last I got relief, but while I never again had the disease in that form, the fear was there and was kept continually before me by every doctor to whom I went. I started out to care for myself, but I had been kept almost entirely to myself for so many years that there was a deep chasm in my life that I did not know how to get across, and my actions and conversation in many respects were simply those of a child. Every way I turned I was continually dipping my feet into the waters of that deep gulf of my former life which it seemed would never be bridged over, and which pressed me back if I wanted to be with others of my age. But for the "promise" I would have become discouraged and given up; and it was there, always ready, no matter how humiliating or how heartrending the blunders I made (and they came thick and fast at times), to help me to my feet to start again. It seemed at times as if I was actually taken by the shoulders and pushed into another kind of work, to show me that I was capable of filling a higher position than I thought; and I could but believe that the time would come when it would be fulfilled.

One dark evening in October, 1898, while returning from work, I stepped into a hole dug by the side of the walk, and suffered serious external and internal injuries. I was up and down all winter, and as soon as it was warm enough in the spring I was sent home. There, after lying in bed three months, the doctor told me that he could not promise me that I would ever sit up again. In 1901, I, however, tried every kind of work I knew how to do, from teaching a country school and having but one dollar and thirty-five cents left at the end of the term, to running a shop by sitting up as long as I could to cut and fit garments, and then lying on the bed and showing the girls how to work; but it was all unprofitable, and in 1902 I went back to the city to learn another kind of work. I broke down before the end of the term, and in January, 1903, was sent to the hospital for an operation. When I got up again my spine was so weak that I was liable to drop down anywhere. In less than a year I was ill again, and the doctors told me that I must have another operation. When I refused, they told me they had done all they could for me. I then came here, and the change was beneficial in that no one here knew what I had been through, so I kept around for a year and a half before breaking down again. Before leaving home I had trouble about remembering things, and it seemed as if the doom pronounced so many years before was forcing itself upon me, so that it was out of the question to undertake any responsible work. Even with what outside work I could pick up. I lived the greater part of the time on three meals a wee; but the "promise" was still there, and surely relief would come in some way.

In March, 1906, I had a severe attack of illness, and after some time, by the advice of friend I went to a Christian Science practitioner. Before long I had learned the truth, that, "because matter has no consciousness or Ego, it cannot act" (Science and Health, p. 368); that God is Mind, and therefore cannot be affected by matter. I was free from the fear I had lived under so long, but as I was still too weak to do much work, I kept up the treatments for about four weeks then discontinued them, but kept on with the reading. One day the following July, in an attempt to move to another room I was overcome, and while lying there trying to deny the error, and at the same time wondering how I was ever going to get my trunk ready, the thought came to me, "If you believe in the power of Truth, why don't you get up and go to work?" I got up, and I have never been in bed nor fallen down since on account of a weak spine. Sixteen days from that date I walked over the hills to a mining town nine and a half miles from Deadwood, a distance I had never before walked at any one time, and suffered no inconvenience because of it. At the same time I laid aside my glasses, and have had no use for them since. The gulf in my life is not simply bridged over. It is gone! I do not know when it went. I only know that one morning the following winter I awoke to the fact that it was there no more—a sure fulfilment of the promise that God is ready to give even more than we ask.

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