Testimony of Healing January 18, 1982 Issue

I have relied completely on God in Christian Science for many...

MARIAN A. BAXTER

I have relied completely on God in Christian Science for many years. This teaching has been and still is the very center of my life—a source of joy and opportunities for progress. There have been a number of healings through the application of Science, including those of an abnormal growth on my forehead, a bladder difficulty, and the effects of a fall.

In 1980, while I was serving as secretary of my Christian Science students association and clerk pro tem of my branch church, I felt fearful, burdened, and weary. I also developed some of the physical problems those around me were having. When I found myself struggling with a severe chest cold, I asked for help from a Christian Science practitioner. Together we worked with two statements of Mrs. Eddy's. In Retrospection and Introspection she writes (p. 61): "Christian Science declares that sickness is a belief, a latent fear, made manifest on the body in different forms of fear or disease." And from Science and Health (p. 469): "The exterminator of error is the great truth that God, good, is the only Mind, and that the supposititious opposite of infinite Mind—called devil or evil—is not Mind, is not Truth, but error, without intelligence or reality." We knew that Love frees from fear, and that God's man is a law unto himself. It was also recognized that our suffering is proportionate to our belief that illness is real.

Despite efforts to see my true selfhood as spiritual, not material, the cold seemed to worsen. I continued going about my usual activities until one morning when there was a severe pain across my chest and in my arm. The practitioner was on her way out of the city for a brief period. So I phoned a neighbor, a Christian Scientist living in my apartment building, and asked her to come over. The definition of man from Science and Health came to mind, and I asked my friend to read it, which she did several times (see p. 591). She also repeated the Lord's Prayer, with its spiritual interpretation by Mrs. Eddy (ibid., pp. 16-17), "the scientific statement of being" (ibid., p. 468), and other favorite passages. My friend stayed an hour or more. The pain would cease for a while, then return, and we would go over the truths once again. By noon I felt able to let her return to her apartment. Another attack occurred in the afternoon, but I was able to declare the truth for myself.

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At a time when I was teaching a Christian Science Sunday School...
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