Testimony of Healing June 18, 1966 Issue

Eleven years ago I was an agnostic, feeling that none of the...

Ethel Diane Depperman

Eleven years ago I was an agnostic, feeling that none of the churches I had attended answered my questions about God. Then I attended a Sunday morning service in a Church of Christ, Scientist, for the first time. Up to that time I had never seen a copy of Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, and most of what I heard in the service was foreign to anything I had ever heard before about God and man. The statement that God is Mind made a marked impression on me. This was a concept of God that I could accept and understand. By the time the service was over, I was no longer an agnostic, and the next day I could hardly wait to get a copy of Science and Health and begin studying Christian Science.

This study gave me a wonderful, new concept of life. About ten days after I began reading Science and Health, I had to report for a compulsory physical examination at the company where I worked. This was the first time, the nurse informed me, that my annual examination showed a normal blood pressure reading. It had been high before. This was my first Christian Science healing, which I attribute to the reading of Science and Health.

A few years ago I asked a practitioner for help when I was in bed with influenza. I felt miserable the next two days, although I studied the Lesson-Sermon, indicated in the Quarterly, praying for the spiritual fact to be revealed which would effect the healing. Finally, I thought of this Bible statement I had read in the lesson: "And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick" (Isa. 33:24). I remember thinking: "It says, 'The inhabitant shall not say, I am sick,' but the trouble is I think I am sick. If it said 'think' instead of 'say,' it would mean something." It dawned on me then that the real man is not conscious of sickness, and this was a promise that human beings can be released from the belief of sickness. This so uplifted my thought that I was able to get out of bed and tell the practitioner I was healed. I have not had influenza or a cold since.