Testimony of Healing January 20, 1917 Issue

I have unbounded gratitude for Christian Science, and know...

Kathryn Leone Wood

I have unbounded gratitude for Christian Science, and know that it heals physically, mentally, and morally, having witnessed and experienced many proofs of God's healing power. I have been cured of stomach trouble, extreme nervousness, sleeplessness, and colds, and on several occasions headache, burns, and other ills have been instantaneously overcome.

In the overcoming step by step of many forms of fear I have even greater cause for gratitude. From childhood I had been haunted by an almost constant sense of apprehension. I was never quite free from a depressing dread of the future, anxiety for loved ones, and foreboding fancies,—all based upon a doubt of God's goodness and allness. Being unusually sensitive and shy, I either feared or disliked a great many people, and when circumstances forced me into almost continual contact with an unsympathetic world I was filled with dread. Away from home, a stranger in a great city, weakened by illness and heartsick with fear, I learned in a crucial moment that God was my salvation, and was literally delivered from my distresses through an awakened perception of God's immanence and power. Later I learned the scientific reason for this experience in the study of Science and Health together with the Bible, which had previously been uninteresting and unprofitable to me. In these books I am learning that there is nothing to fear in all God's universe; that tomorrow holds no danger and the yesterdays no regret. The terrors of limitation and lack are gone, and in their stead is a calm certainty of God's abundant good in every direction. Hate and fear of others have been overcome on the basis of one Mind which knows only love.

The intimate relationship between thought and human activity was illustrated with special force on one occasion. I had been cherishing a feeling of injury toward another, and it was rankling during the process of painting a picture. My work was unsatisfactory, below my usual standard. I tried hard for better results but without success; the desired beauty and freshness of color were absent. Then I began to apply my knowledge of Christian Science, and it was revealed to me how dark and unlovely my thoughts had been. Self-righteousness and self-pity had been coloring my consciousness and the picture had symbolized their nature. I changed my thinking, illumined my heart with loving compassion for the one whom I had been seeing as enemy, and as I painted in this spirit I gained a better picture and a better friend through the exalting influence of Love; and best of all, a better understanding of the meaning of Christian Science.

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