Testimony of Healing February 18, 1911 Issue

I have long wanted to tell of my great debt of gratitude...

Daisie Burd Parsons

I have long wanted to tell of my great debt of gratitude to Christian Science, but the blessings have come so fast in the last few years that I did not know which to relate. As a child I was never strong, my earliest recollections being of attacks of various diseases, apparently inherited. Left alone while a very young girl, I came to North Dakota to make my home with an aunt who was a Christian Scientist. The atmosphere of this home at once appealed to me as being permeated with love, and I began to study and try to understanding this truth. My health became much better, but, although I called myself a Christian Scientist and really thought I was one, I had not grasped the Principle, and did not see that I must give up a great deal of selfishness before I could gain this understanding. After completing my education I started to teach, but my old troubles came back with redoubled force. I tried different Christian Science practitioners, but received almost no help. Then I turned to materia medica, but got only temporary relief, the doctors finally telling me that, as the diseases were inherited, I must expect to endure them.

In the mean time I married, and all that love and good care could do to bring health to one was done, and for a short time I was better. But when my first baby was about three months old I felt the old ailments coming on, with all their tortures. How I fought them, and how kind the physicians were in helping me with the fight; but it was all to no avail! I suffered terribly in body, but that was nothing compared to the mental anguish. I could not accept the orthodox interpretation of God, and I had not grasped the significance of God as revealed in Christian Science. I thought I could not get the needed help from this Science, partly because it had seemed to fail in my case, but mostly because I erroneously believed it taught that the human mind controlled the body, and I thought that my mind was if anything in a worse state than my body.

One day, when I had been very ill, and my physician was very frank, this thought came to me: I had learned in Christian Science that God is good and is the only power; then good was all, and here I had been giving more power to evil than to God. Then and there, in the blackest night of material sense, did this light come to me which for so many years I had failed to see. I had a copy of Science and Health in the house, and I fairly devoured it. I was no longer afraid of the human mind, either my own or another's. I knew that there is only one Mind. Words are feeble to express the joy of those weeks when I was reading Science and Health, really reading it with understanding for the first time. It did not matter whether I was healed or not; I had found God, and nothing else counted.

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