Testimony of Healing January 19, 1929 Issue

As I have tried to summarize my debt to divine Love,...

Paulina Freeman

As I have tried to summarize my debt to divine Love, the thought has kept coming to me, with an insistence that will not allow me to delay another day, that one tithe which I have not yet brought into the storehouse is a written testimony; and while the blessings that have come to me through Christian Science have accumulated until they could not be told in one testimony, I desire at least to make a beginning.

When I was settling down into the life of a tyrannical semi-invalid, unhappy myself and making all around me unhappy, Christian Science awakened me to see that sickness may be a form of selfishness: that it was selfish for me to be absorbed in my own feelings; selfish to give in to helplessness and add to the burden of others, when I should be up and doing my part by making the home happy and lightening those burdens. The one thing I seemed to miss in this wonderful new religion, the one thing I felt deprived of by Christian Science, was my old, ever ready excuse, whenever I did not want to do anything, that I did not feel able to; and I had supposed that this was a perfectly truthful, unavoidable, unanswerable, and legitimate reason until I learned that it was my duty to be "never unready to work for God" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 116). I had to learn, also, that worry is caused by lack of trust in God; that sorrow comes from having other gods; and that the remedy is to be found in "daily Christian endeavors for the living" (Church Manual, p. 60). The most stubborn and subtle form of selfishness, I am learning at last, is self-justification, blaming our trials on circumstances or on the faults or mistakes of others, instead of accepting full responsibility for our own wrong thinking and wrong acting.

So, through a period of many years and many struggles, I have come to understand something of Whittier's meaning when he wrote,

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