When I was a new student of Christian Science I experienced a major physical healing just from reading the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy. At the time of this healing I was aware that the last hundred pages of the book, the chapter titled "Fruitage," consisted of many short testimonials of all kinds of healings, but I was not aware that all of these had resulted from merely reading Science and Health!

In 1990 I began to experience severe muscular tension. I had been a student of yoga stretching exercises and Oriental self-massage for nearly two decades, so I began treating myself using these techniques.

I calculated that exercise and massage would do the trick, but they didn't. I was having to spend more time exercising and massaging, and became more preoccupied with the situation and unhappy because of the pain.

A co-worker introduced me to a self-massage tool. As another year went by I was grateful for temporary moments of relief from the use of the gadget, but in retrospect I had given up on ever having a permanent, complete healing.

Then Christian Science and I found each other, and it was love at first sight! A Christian Science Reading Room was a ten-minute walk from my office. I visited it several times a week and hungrily read back issues of the Sentinel and The Christian Science Journal. Within a five-minute walk of my workplace were the offices of six Christian Science practitioners. I often dropped in on them to talk about Christian Science, and they always gave generously of their time to answer my questions. I attended Sunday church services and Wednesday testimony meetings regularly.

A church member instructed me on how to study the weekly Bible Lesson, found in the Christian Science Quarterly, as I wasn't clear about how to do this.

I heard that, in addition to studying the Lesson, people were encouraged to read the textbook straight through, so two months after finding Science I began. Not understanding parts of it didn't deter me, because I was having a wonderful experience in learning about Science and sensed the enormous value that people placed on this book. It was important to me to read it all.

By the time I read halfway through the chapter "Christian Science Practice," I had my healing. I remember throughout the course of the book up to that point, there was a continual impartation of the fact that man (that is, God's man, the real man, including all men, women, and children) is not material; he is spiritual. Each time I was fed this truth, it became a little more real, until over a four-day period all the tension melted away from me, never to return.

Since then, healing—wholeness—has become a way of life: physical, moral, mental, career, relationships, and more. Can I ever be too grateful to God for Christian Science? No, I couldn't.

Daniel R. Ziskind
Portland, Oregon