Testimony of Healing August 31, 1929 Issue

During the twenty-four years and more since my first...

Alice McCray Merriell

During the twenty-four years and more since my first healing in Christian Science, there has been such an accumulation of blessings that it is impossible to speak of one or two as more helpful than all the rest. But every Christian Scientist finds that there are certain experiences which endure in his thought, and bring forth fruits unto holiness because of the lessons they teach.

My first experience of this nature was that of being saved from injury during a cyclone which broke every window in our house and demolished much of the furniture. I have always remembered with gratitude my mother's words, in the lull that followed the winds: "We must all thank God that He has saved us!" It was a marvelous proof of the protecting care of divine, ever present Love. After twenty-two years of learning to thank God for all good, I realized that a much greater healing than the salvation from physical injury had been mine at that time; for I know now that that proof of God's power healed me of any doubt that Christian Science—the law of God—does heal and correct everything that is unlike God and His idea.

Many years later the lesson of giving thanks—of praising God—was again brought home to me through the healing of one of our little boys. We heard the child begin to cry and cough as with croup one evening about five years ago; and when I went to help him he seemed unable to lie down because of choking, and was quite terrified. I picked him up and took him into my own room, so that he would not awaken the other children. Turning to our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, with a half-formed prayer that God would show me how to help the little one, I opened the book to our Leader's beautiful paraphrase of the twenty-third psalm (p. 578), beginning "[Divine Love] is my shepherd; I shall not want." The little boy was instantly quiet. Before I finished the psalm he was sleeping peacefully, and did not cough again that night. About a year later he coughed in the same way, and I again repeated the psalm as interpreted by our Leader. I have had the same experience of almost instant overcoming of a croupy cough, with the same child, twice since; and some time after I realized that he had been healed of a condition of the throat which would probably have been called enlarged tonsils, or adenoids, and which disappeared without any specific treatment, through our growth in understanding.

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