Testimony of Healing February 11, 1950 Issue

Looking back over a life interwoven...

Ruth Synnott Crozier with contributions from Corinne Rugel

Looking back over a life interwoven with the multiple blessings of Christian Science since babyhood, it is difficult to choose an experience or experiences for which to express particular gratitude. I am grateful for an aunt who helped teach me to love Christian Science when I was small; I am grateful for the Sunday School teachers and for loving practitioners and friends who have helped me along the way; and I am most grateful for the demonstrations I worked out alone with the Bible and with Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy.

I remember a childhood made painful and wretched by an excessive shyness, and I remember that when I was fourteen years old I took up the challenge and overcame this error through Christian Science. I learned that shyness is a form of self-centeredness, and that I must forget myself and try to make other people happy. I found I could be "hid with Christ in God." In less than a year's time I was president of a large girls' club and won a prize as an extemporaneous speaker, and with no sense of self-consciousness. No one who has not had this burden of shyness can possibly appreciate the freedom and joy that the overcoming of it brings.

The summer I was sixteen, a leg became infected with poison ivy and, through some complication, blood poisoning set in. This ugly manifestation, which had started in my ankle, had reached my thigh when the principal of my high school came to see me. Because I had been president of the city-wide girls' club, my condition had become noised abroad, and efforts had been made to persuade the district attorney to interfere and force me to have a doctor. My father, who was a lawyer, had told the district attorney that the decision was entirely mine. The principal of the school tried to persuade me to have a doctor. He told me that I would die without one. I remember reasoning with him and telling him how useless it would be to call a doctor, because I could have no faith in one, whereas I knew God could and would heal me. It was plain to me that "what God cannot do, man need not attempt" (Science and Health, p. 231).

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