There was a time in my life when I felt I had the rug pulled out from under me because of an injury. The healing of this condition came through a firm conviction that God was not some distant deity, aloof and uninterested, but was the very essence of my life and my being.

When I was a senior in high school, I won the United States Men's Figure Skating title and competed in the World Championships. Afterward, in an effort to master a back flip that could be added to my routine on ice, I attended a gymnastics session at my school. Even though I was in a safety harness, I landed one attempt awkwardly and injured my knee. From that point on, my knee would give out without warning when I was skating. I became very cautious and protective of the knee, and my progress in the sport halted altogether.

Alarmed, my skating coach insisted that I have the injury examined and have something done about it. The medical verdict was a trick knee, a common injury for football players and other athletes. The doctors told me they could operate on it, but they could not guarantee full use of the knee again. This was an outcome I would not accept.

My parents were not Christian Scientists, but I had been raised in a Christian Science Sunday School. I decided to visit a Christian Science practitioner, who devoted her full time to Christian healing and was also my Sunday School teacher. In the most loving manner, she reminded me of many of the spiritual truths I had been learning in class. She finished by saying, "My dear, there can be no trickiness in God!"

The power of that single statement was undeniable to me. Its simplicity and truth caused all fear to dissipate. I knew God's love for His creation was infinite, and that His love included me. I decided right then and there that I would seek spiritual healing alone.

Reason convinced me that a loving God would never abandon His children. I knew that we are all His image—His reflection—as the Bible tells us. So instead of continuing to think God was distant, menacing, or uncaring, I began to understand and to claim God as ever near, ever watchful, ever protective. Instead of feeling isolated from God and alone, I saw that reflecting Him was the real purpose of my day, the only reason for all my activity. Instead of feeling cast off and detached from God, I began to sing with Hymn 135 (in the Christian Science Hymnal) that I could fear no tribulation nor feel any "separation between my Lord and me." Instead of continuing to be self-critical and self-deprecating, I began to see my self-worth as the full expression of God's qualities. And I began to acknowledge God as not a stern judge but my greatest fan and friend.

Well, it didn't take any time at all for the sureness and power of these truths to sweep away the darkness, doubt, and fear in my thinking.

The needed mental surgery had taken place, and with this renewed conviction in the allness of God's love came healing—first as a change in my thinking, and then as a change in my body. And that was the end of the problem. I went on with a successful skating career for two more years, which culminated in my skating in the Olympics. I have maintained an active life ever since with skiing, rowing, hiking, roller blading, and dancing as regular activities, and have never had a recurrence of the knee problem.

Where does the claim of distance or separation from God come from? Some people mistakenly have a view of God as variable, jealous, and even vengeful. They may even feel that God is nonexistent or dead. They may see disasters, setbacks, and illness as "the will of God," as it is sometimes expressed in Biblical terms. And they may resign themselves to suffering through these difficulties, all because they fail to understand His true nature as a totally loving Parent, as our Father-Mother God.

What a restrictive and self-defeating view of God and man! It would see mankind as trapped in some kind of cosmic blender that stirs things up often for no reason. No responsible parent would ever put a child in such a situation.

A number of accounts in the Old Testament might seem to support this limited, unnatural view of God. The Jewish concept of God, at times, gave rise to the concept of a punishing deity. In Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy explains, "The Jewish tribal Jehovah was a man-projected God, liable to wrath, repentance, and human changeableness" (p. 140).

Indeed, an entire book in the Old Testament chronicles the tribulations of Job, a servant of God, whose only "misdeed" was that he was an upright man who loved and worshiped God. In this epic poem, Satan bets God that he can get Job to curse Him. Then Satan unleashes on repeated waves of discouragement arising from loss of possessions, wealth, family, and finally personal health. At first, Job remains firm in his steadfast trust in God. Then Job wavers and turns from this trust by cursing the day of his birth.

The story comes full circle when Job, after talking with his friends, and finally with God, seems to realize that his burdens and sorrows have nothing to do with God. He realizes that his relation to God has never been broken. And that is the end of his tortured state. When he understands his eternal oneness with God, his suffering ends, and we read that "the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning" (Job 42:12).

Isn't that the nature of the devil, to try to get us to curse God as the source of our human woes? Whereas the solution is to take an absolute stand for God's complete goodness. We learn in Christian Science to treat sin and sickness in this way: "Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more the author of sickness than He is of sin" (Science and Health,p. 390). And on the same page, Mrs. Eddy writes, "It is our ignorance of God, the divine Principle, which produces apparent discord, and the right understanding of Him restores harmony."

I learned through my experience that injury or sickness begins as a suggestion, Satan's "going to and fro in the earth" (Job 1:7), and not as the truth about my unblemished being. I also discovered there was no power in such a suggestion to control my experience, unless I believed it to be true.

I claimed my innocence as a child of God, saw that nothing could separate me from my Maker—a wholly consistent, supportive, loving Parent. And from this renewed recognition of God as all Love, I fully experienced the victory and freedom that conforming one's thinking with God brings about. And so can you!