Testimony of Healing April 9, 1927 Issue

About five years ago, I found myself in a strange city...

Julia E. Shaw

About five years ago, I found myself in a strange city under a sense of such general physical exhaustion and mental depression that I became greatly alarmed as to my ability to continue in the work I had undertaken. At that time I had a certain confidence in chiropractic and osteopathy. I had been attracted by Christian Science, but it had seemed difficult for me to grasp, and I had followed it in only desultory fashion. I realized I had reached the point where I must make a final decision. Chiropractic beckoned and tempted, but Christian Science won. I was a total stranger in the town, and knew of no practitioner. Though laboring under a sense of illness, I dressed and went out into the storm to find one. I hunted up a Reading Room and made inquiry there. I was directed to a practitioner living in the neighborhood. I have thanked God ever since for my meeting with that dear woman. Before I had talked with her many minutes I had made a beginning in understanding. I felt a sense of peace enfold me, and experienced a quiet dissolution of the persistent "How?" and "Why?" As she went on and defined Love and the real man as distinguished from a mortal, I knew I was home at last. I went back to my hotel, and awoke the next morning to the realization of a world full of joy and energy. I had lost all sense of fatigue and of physical effort in moving about, and had gained, instead, a sense of joyful buoyancy.

Upon crossing the Canadian border, on the way to Montreal, I was obliged to submit to enforced vaccination as a protective measure against a general fear of smallpox. As a result, a severe difficulty developed, the sense of suffering being so intense that I could neither sleep nor eat. I managed to continue my work, but after a few days was forced to seek help; so wired the same practitioner. A complication affecting the throat had set in an threatened to make the use of the voice for public work impossible. Relief came immediately.

Then error got the better of me, and I made the mistake of looking at my throat to see how things were. The result was a panic of fear. As, alone in my room, I struggled against an overwhelming sense of pain and helplessness, suddenly a voice seemed to sound over my bed, saying, "Come ye to the waters, all ye that thirst." I turned my head to look at the table where my Science books lay, knowing I was being directed to them. I picked up "Miscellaneous Writings," and turned to "The Mother's Evening Prayer" (p. 389). I read the poem through; then was inspired to try to memorize it accepting each line as I memorized it. Before I had completed the third stanza I suddenly realized I was completely healed. I had no sense of pain anywhere, and felt full of buoyant energy. I dressed, and went out to eat the first real meal I had been able to eat all the week. With the thermometer at thirty-eight degrees below zero, I felt no discomfort from the cold; nor did I at any time during the rest of my stay in Canada. It was a blessed healing.

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