Testimony of Healing April 19, 1993 Issue

At one time I had the desire to become a member of a...

Sally Ann Beale

At one time I had the desire to become a member of a Christian Science branch church, in order to give back something of what I was gaining from my study of Christian Science. A long-standing smoking habit prevented this. The harder I tried to overcome smoking, the more severe seemed to be the hold nicotine had on me. I felt doomed to smoke, yet these words kept coming to me as I prayed: "Desire is prayer." I kept returning to the passage in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy that contains those words: "Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds." While I wanted to trust God with my desires, I agonized over this addiction.

I kept on reading Science and Health and praying for right desire. I read, "Prayer cannot change the unalterable Truth, nor can prayer alone give us an understanding of Truth; but prayer, coupled with a fervent habitual desire to know and do the will of God, will bring us into all Truth." More than anything else, I wanted "to know and do the will of God." Therefore I asked for help from a Christian Science practitioner. Patiently and lovingly he assured me that addiction to cigarettes is no part of God's man. He suggested I could stop wrestling with the problem, because one day the belief in the habit would simply leave me; it would be replaced with something higher, something more spiritual; he reminded me to be patient and helped me to see God's love for me. He also said, "Don't worry. God isn't finished with you yet!"

During this time there were many demands on my time, and I often felt I was too busy to read the Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly. One day I happened to mention this to a friend who was a devout Christian Scientist, and she immediately offered to mark the lesson in my Bible and Science and Health for me. I was really impressed that she would consider it important enough to do this for me! Later I told the practitioner about that incident, and he said, "It worked, didn't it?" Needless to say, after that I recognized what blessings the lessons are. (In fact, I started marking books to share with someone who couldn't mark her own.)

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