I want to share a wonderful healing that took place recently. In my work as a real estate agent, I was helping my husband fix a furnace vent pipe in the attic of a home I was selling for a client. The pipe had fallen and needed to be wired up. My husband was in the attic, and I climbed the ladder to the small square entrance hole in the ceiling of the closet. When I put my left knee on the opening, my right foot on the top of the ladder pushed the ladder over and I was thrown off balance. I hit several things as I fell. The first thought I had was, "God is my life." Soon after I thought, "I am 'knit together in love.'" (Later I found in a Bible concordance that Paul had said this in his letter to the Colossians [2:2].)

My husband was very fearful as he looked at me from the hole above. He couldn't get down to help. But I needed only God's help to get up and straighten the ladder enough for him to get down. Then he made me lie down while he called a Christian Science practitioner. She immediately began treating me through prayer, witnessing my perfection as God's offspring. I tried to get up again, but kept feeling faint and sick. My husband wanted to call an ambulance, but I asked him not to. He called the practitioner again, and she said she'd be right there.

When she arrived, she sat by me on the floor and brought the most tender sense of God's love for me. She assured me, with her arms out as though holding someone, that Spirit was seeking and finding me perfect the whole time. This helped erase the violent mental picture of me twisting and falling in that closet. I felt protected in those arms of Spirit.

Finally, I was able to rise slowly without blacking out. With my husband and the practitioner helping me, I walked down a flight of stairs and got into our car. For the next three days I studied wonderful truths about my real self and my oneness with God. I realized that it didn't even matter if my thought got fearful temporarily because my Mind, the one God, was not impressed or afraid for me.

I woke one night after having a dream that rehearsed my injuries, leaving me with a great feeling of fear. I asked myself if I really wanted to overcome the fear. My answer was "Yes!" and almost instantly the fear was gone. I felt peaceful because I actually felt the presence of divine Love. From this point on, I felt certain the healing was in God's good hands, and I could watch it take place.

Discouragement did come again, however. I still needed to see some very valuable truths about myself. I really needed to accept my "preexistence as God's child." This comes from a statement by Mary Baker Eddy in her Miscellaneous Writings. She says, "Mortals will lose their sense of mortality—disease, sickness, sin, and death—in the proportion that they gain the sense of man's spiritual preexistence as God's child; as the offspring of good, and not of God's opposite,—evil, or a fallen man" (p. 181).

It really stood out to me that I still was trying to fix the body instead of seeing that there was no material me to fix. I had existed forever as a spiritual idea, and did not depend on a material form for my identity. It's one thing to say this, of course, and another to see it. For the first time I did glimpse that in the only creation that ever was—spiritual reality—I was made apart from matter, separate forever from matter.

Another wonderful insight that came along with this was that no matter where I was or what I was doing, I could walk over "earth's troubled, angry sea" (Mrs. Eddy, Poems, p. 12) and not sink into it. As soon as I left the whole thing to God—my body, my family, my business, and the whole future—I was able to get up, dress, and rejoice in freedom again, real freedom, permanent, irrevocable, given to us all! Gratitude abounds!

Sally L. Lind
Solana Beach, California