Testimony of Healing March 11, 1996 Issue

My husband and I have been Christian Scientists all our lives...

Laura Colvin Matheny

My husband and I have been Christian Scientists all our lives and have relied exclusively on spiritual healing to meet our needs. When we were expecting our first child, I was very diligent in prayer. I worked with a Christian Science practitioner to nurture my spiritual understanding of our roles as mother and father, and to gain a deeper understanding about the spiritual identity of the baby and birth process. Our birth attendant was a midwife who was comfortable in allowing us to rely on prayer.

Because of the earnest praying I had done prior to the birth, I expected a harmonious and pain-free delivery. What I experienced, however, was an extremely painful and slow delivery. I felt separated from God's love and care because of the pain. Even with these difficulties, though, the baby was born naturally and was healthy. But after the birth it took me a long time to recover, and I was nagged by aches in my lower back. I had a great many fears and mental scars that needed to be healed.

A year and a half later, I was expecting another baby. I was extremely fearful and apprehensive about the labor and prayed with a practitioner about this. During one conversation he explained that he wasn't praying for a pain-free human birth experience (although this is what I had been praying for—just as I had done the first time). He said to me that we weren't trying to use God's laws to "fix" the mortal experience, but we were elevating our thoughts out of the mortal belief of birth, maturity, and death into understanding of God's harmonious law of eternal creation as never beginning and never ending. The birth was much easier. Although there were times I was not comfortable, I was free from pain, and labor progressed naturally. The next day I was doing all my normal duties, caring for our beautiful new daughter as well as our older daughter. There was no recuperation period.

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