Testimony of Healing January 11, 1936 Issue

It is a great thing to be able to testify that Christian Science...

Gatling H. King

It is a great thing to be able to testify that Christian Science takes away the sting from death. About two years ago my only child, a daughter of seventeen, passed on in an automobile accident. Often when our happy companionship had been pointed out as an unusual thing in these modern days, I remarked that it was the result of our having grown up in Christian Science together. I had begun to study when she was only a few years old, and often her unbiased thought had grasped the meaning of the simple truth more quickly than mine.

Faced with the seeming loss of the most beautiful thing that the world had ever given me, life itself seemed meaningless and full of pain. Through the loving help of Christian Scientists, and especially of one loyal student in the small town in which I was living, I was enabled to go through the first days and weeks of this experience in a manner worthy of one who for many years had professed Christian Science. I had an earnest desire not to fail the Cause which I loved so well, and as First Reader of a little circle of students I carried on my work with but one absence from my post—the Sunday morning on which the accident occurred.

As the days went by, the loneliness grew more real to me, and I knew that much earnest effort on my part would be required to overcome it. During the years of my study I had proved that sickness, sin, and lack could be banished by applying Christian Science, and I knew that sorrow too must give up its seeming reality. In spite of suggestions of grief and separation, I stuck to my prayerful study. Many times Mrs. Eddy's words on page 66 of Science and Health came to me, "Trials are proofs of God's care," and, "Each successive stage of experience unfolds new views of divine goodness and love." The meaning of these words was revealed to me in a simple manner. During a conversation with a student who was laboring under a sense of injustice and mistreatment, I was asked if I did not find that people were cruel to Christian Scientists. After a few minutes of thought. I replied that I could not recall a single instance of deliberate mistreatment toward me in the past year. My thought was flooded with the proofs I had had of the love and thoughtfulness of relatives, friends, and everyone with whom I had come in contact. I saw that tenderness, compassion, kindness, thoughtfulness, and patience were qualities of God, and I realized that I was really experiencing the tender, protecting care of divine Love.

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