Testimony of Healing June 17, 1991 Issue

Ever since childhood I had been fearful of fire and its effects

Dorothy M. Jenkins Mulford

Ever since childhood I had been fearful of fire and its effects. It seemed to me to be an especially terrible and destructive element. Thus it was somewhat of a shock when my mother called me from my parents' cabin in eastern Oregon one summer morning and asked me to pray—quickly. While someone had been creosoting fence posts not far away, an explosion had occurred, igniting the tinder-dry jack pines in the immediate vicinity; and the wind was directing the flames toward their little cabin community.

I literally ran to find my Bible and my copy of Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy in order to calm my thought with the healing messages in them. I have been a student of Christian Science all my life and am very familiar with these books. I thought of the story in the Bible of Elijah and the "still small voice" of God that came to him after the experience of witnessing a strong wind, an earthquake, and a fire (see I Kings 19:8–12). Then I turned to the following passage in Science and Health: "There is no vapid fury of mortal mind—expressed in earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity—and this so-called mind is self-destroyed."

I had read this passage many times and had always mentally given the word vapid the definition of "terrible," "awful." On this day, however, I was impelled to look up the word in the dictionary and found, to my surprise, that it means "insipid, dull, uninteresting, lifeless, without spirit or animation." I literally laughed out loud at how ridiculous it was to believe that anything so unlike God, good, deserved so much attention or that it should be feared as being destructive. I saw the fire as, at base, nothingness, completely without power to destroy any part of God's spiritual creation. God is the only power.

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