Testimony of Healing October 4, 1982 Issue

A few years ago, when I was beginning the last...

BRIAN V. PETTERSEN with contributions from BARBARA PETTERSEN

A few years ago, when I was beginning the last year of my term as First Reader in our branch Church of Christ, Scientist, I suffered a heart attack. This condition was a relapse of a milder one I had had a few years before, but now I felt as if the battle of Armageddon were upon me. I immediately prayed for myself in Christian Science. But after a few days it became clear that I needed the help of a Christian Science practitioner.

The belief of heredity was one of the lies that needed to be forcefully denied and destroyed. We prayed from the standpoint that because I was really a spiritual idea or child of God, my true Father-Mother, I had never been formed or deformed by matter or mortal belief. We took very seriously Christ Jesus' admonition (Matt. 23:9), "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven." I learned as never before how important to one's health and very life a scientific consideration of that statement really is.

Suggestions of death were constantly welling up in my thought; and because our boy was just a toddler, emotion attempted to take control of my thinking. There were many occasions when I felt I was passing on, but each time I would rise up in rebellion against the suggestion. When it seemed to shout at me, I shouted back all the louder that God was my strength, my health, my Life. I knew that since I was the very expression of God, I simply had to express the divine Life.

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