Testimony of Healing March 13, 1926 Issue

My first experience in Christian Science still seems very...

Viola C. Dearman

My first experience in Christian Science still seems very near and helpful to me, although it came in 1914. I had been very ill for several years, and one surgical operation after another seemed necessary. Both my husband and I had decided we would never consent to another one; but again it seemed a case of life or death. The apparently absolute necessity of this last and greatest operation was certainly "man's extremity." I knew nothing of Christian Science, but felt a most unreasonable hatred toward it and carefully avoided one friend, who I knew had been physically healed through its teaching. This friend came to see me and laid the book "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy on my bed, asking me to read it just to please her. I told her I had not been able to see to read for a long time; but at the same time I unconsciously opened the book to the place she spoke of, and together we went through the Lord's Prayer with its spiritual interpretation as given there (pp. 16, 17) by our Leader, Mrs. Eddy. I was so surprised to find that Christian Scientists believed and used the Lord's Prayer that I suppose all the hatred of what I thought it to be dropped away at that moment. But the healing of my eyes surely came first, because I had been reading for the first time in a very long while.

I did not know Christian Science was a religion, and I knew nothing of practitioners; so all my waking time was spent in reading Science and Health. I was not expecting to be healed, and did not realize I had been healed but was so intensely interested in this divine revelation to mankind that I lost all sense of time. Family and friends tell me that about two weeks passed in this way, until one afternoon to their great surprise I got up and dressed and went about the house as though I had never been ill.

Our small daughter had always been very delicate, but since my healing Christian Science has been our only physician, and we have all had many instantaneous releases as well as many experiences where further steps in understanding were necessary. Our gratitude for the unfoldment of this truth can be proved only by our ability to live it daily.—(Mrs.) Viola C. Dearman, Santa Barbara, California.

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