The many instances of practical...

Roy F. Hudson

The many instances of practical help that I receive from reading the testimonies in the Christian Science periodicals continually prompt my gratitude. It is with a desire to share with others the good which has been so richly shared with me that I add my testimony to the abundant fruitage of Christian Science.

Through the study and application of this Science, often with the prayerful work of a practitioner, I have been healed of heart trouble, stomach disorders, general debility, heartburn, colds, headaches, effects of accidents, and other ills. Lack of supply and ugly traits of character have also been overcome. One healing for which I shall never cease to be grateful and which most contributed to my spiritual growth was the overcoming of the tobacco habit.

I acquired this habit at a very early age, and it soon became a dominating, enslaving master. When I first became acquainted with Christian Science I was uncomfortable under the fetters of this costly, ugly habit, and I longed to be free from it. I sought help from a Christian Science practitioner, and the first question she asked me was a most important one: "Do you want to give it up?"

I immediately answered, "Yes," but I can now see that this was an unthinking answer, for it was not until much later that I really was willing to give up the habit and all that it stood for. Numerous were the times I threw away cigarettes and pipes with a firm resolution never to smoke again, numerous were the days of torture and mental anguish that followed, and numerous were the degrading returns to the tobacco habit. I finally concluded that I must be a weakling and that it was futile for me to try to gain enough strength to overcome the habit. With a heavy heart I was just about to drink the draught of complete resignation when the grand lesson that needed to be learned was grasped.

I saw that I had not been spiritually awake to the fact that the real man never has smoked and is not subject to any harmful habit. I had not been willing to give up self and ease in matter, but instead I had perpetuated them through exercising self-love, self-will, and self-justification. When I realized that what I needed was to be obedient to Love, to let go of self, to stop trying merely to heal matter, and to let God, Love, be expressed, I lost all consciousness of the smoking habit. It just disappeared as I gained spiritual strength from expressing Love.

Mary Baker Eddy states this process clearly in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (Pref., p. xi), "The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation."

I am increasingly grateful for my membership in The Mother Church, for the opportunity to serve in a branch church, for class instruction, and for all the activities of the Christian Science movement.—Roy F. Hudson, Wichita, Kansas.

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