"If I could just learn something of love as Jesus loved ..."

Who couldn't use more light, more clarity in a time of questioning? And if we are in the middle of our own search for light, it sometimes helps to hear the experiences of others who are finding "there ariseth light in the darkness," as the Psalmist describes it. This column records some experiences that may be useful to those who are looking for new answers. Unlike the other articles in this special issue, accounts in "Finding Light" are anonymous in order to give authors the opportunity to talk freely about earlier lifestyles and attitudes that may have been considerably different from what they now value. Of necessity, the recounting of experiences is telescoped in its time frame, and these narratives do not attempt to tell a complete story. But they do show something of the wide range of seekers and the way in which the light of Christ, Truth, restores, redirects, and regenerates lives.

The circumstances in which individuals turn more wholeheartedly to God vary widely. In my own case, I had just returned from my doctor's office. He had told me that the symptoms of miscarriage I was suffering would most probably result in the loss of the baby—a child my husband and I deeply yearned for. Years previously I had left my traditional Protestant upbringing and stopped believing in God. Having been taught that He loved us but sent sickness and misfortune so that we would learn to become more obedient, I didn't feel like loving or trusting Him at all.

Yet, with nowhere else to turn, I silently began to try to pray to this unknown God. I told Him what I'd been taught to believe and that I honestly did not know whether it was true or even if He really existed. The only thing that made any sense at all was that if He did exist and truly loved us, then in the long run He must want only the best for us. I began to be willing to trust Him. I thought of the words from the Lord's Prayer "Thy will be done." Whatever God's will for me and my child, I began to realize that ultimately it had to be good. I began to want more than anything else for His will to be done for us.

As I prayed along these lines, unexpectedly I felt surrounded with a sense of warmth, light, and love. In a way that was beyond merely intellectual comprehension, I felt utterly convinced that God and I were inseparable. And in that moment I knew that oneness was enough. Gone was any thought of miscarriage or any fear of losing a child. My thought was filled with the love of God and gratitude to Him for showing me that He was with me there. The symptoms disappeared.

Years later I was to read in Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, under the marginal heading "Spiritualized consciousness," these words: "Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,—and the body will then utter no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find yourself suddenly well. Sorrow is turned into joy when the body is controlled by spiritual Life, Truth, and Love." And that is exactly what happened. Although I did not understand it at the time, this was the explanation of the spiritual process by which I was healed of symptoms of miscarriage. The child of this healing is today a young man of eighteen years, who continues to give us much joy.

After this experience I found myself with a hunger for religion. I longed for a greater understanding of God as I now glimpsed Him to be—a God who is Love and a God who is knowable, as the Scriptures tell us. I returned to my former denomination and began reading the Bible. Over a period of about a dozen years I struggled with the fact that the glimpses of God's completely loving nature I was seeing from my Bible study and through turning to Him in prayer were not what I was still hearing about God. A God who is limited as to what He can do for His children, a changeable God whose will we cannot know and who sends both good and evil—these descriptions did not match the God I was increasingly experiencing as wholly good.

During this period I generally relied on medical care for myself and my family. Yet there were many times when I simply turned to God for help instead, either because the medical care had done all it could or because I was frightened by a doctor's negative prognosis or sometimes just because I wanted to feel God's healing touch with me. There were healings of headache, flu, a quick healing of a burn our son received when he grabbed the hot exhaust pipe of our car, and an instantaneous healing of measles for our child. These always came when I simply prayed to God and relied wholeheartedly on His care as I had during the first healing of miscarriage.

Continually I yearned to understand more of God's nature and was troubled by the fact that I didn't seem to be growing spiritually. I evidenced nothing of the regenerative change in character that traditional theology tells us we will have when we accept Christ into our hearts. I had formally and sincerely made this commitment and was trying to live in accord with it. But I still felt like the same old person.

One night, in the midst of trying to handle some pretty desperate-looking family problems, I asked God to teach me to love truly. I felt that if I could just learn something of love as Christ Jesus loved, I could heal these problems.

The next day an acquaintance invited me to a Christian Science Sunday church service. Surprisingly, I accepted. Surprisingly because I had heard of Christian Science and believed it to be a cult of some sort and not Christian or Bible-believing. In fact, I didn't even think Christian Scientists had a real church! I had heard of Christian Science Reading Rooms and thought that people just went into a big library sort of building at any time that struck their fancy and read who knows what.

Well, there is nothing like firsthand experience of the truth of something to remove ignorance and prejudiced beliefs. At that Christian Science church service, as I heard the Lesson-Sermon read from the Bible followed by correlative passages from the Christian Science textbook, I felt as though I had come home. I was at the end of my search for God—or really at the beginning! I borrowed the textbook, Science and Health, and read it from cover to cover. I could see that its author loved the Bible, and in her book I saw the possibility of learning to understand Scripture and know God as never before.

After about a year, during which I learned through experience that I was able to rely completely on God for healing, I joined that branch church and The Mother Church.

Discovering an entire Christian denomination whose adherents have sought to understand God as wholly good and to rely on God for healing for more than a hundred years, fills me with gratitude. I wouldn't want to mislead any reader into thinking my life since then has been a bed of roses. But my understanding of God has steadily grown, and with it my love for others and the healing confidence in the utter reality of divine Spirit's allness.