Testimony of Healing May 17, 1999 Issue

Prayer heals long-standing pain

Catherine Edge

About a year and a half ago I began to experience severe pain in my arms. It was impossible to lift my arms above my head, and many nights I would lie awake in terrible pain, praying as best I could. Every day I prayed to understand the unreality of pain and my freedom as the expression of God, good.

As the months dragged on, however, I began to fear that I would never be free from the pain or have normal use of my arms. Then one Wednesday night during the testimony meeting in the branch Church of Christ, Scientist, that I attend, a woman told of a healing her husband experienced of a painful condition in his arms. This gave me a huge feeling of hope as I continued to pray for myself. A couple of months later a Christian Science lecturer spoke of many healings, including one she had had of pain in her arms. These two healings were a great help, giving me hope and a conviction that I, too, would be healed.

Then while I was reading the book Painting a Poem: Mary Baker Eddy and James F. Gilman Illustrate Christ and Christmas (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1998), something caught my attention that woke me up to the need to be obedient to the directives in Science and Health about how to heal. One such statement is, "To heal by argument, find the type of the ailment, get its name, and array your mental plea against the physical" (p. 412). I realized that until now my metaphysical treatment had been only a general denial of power to pain. When I began praying more specifically, it struck me that this belief of pain that was localized in the nerves of the upper arm was a ridiculous, insupportable claim. How could nerves know to be painful in one part of the body and not another? When I saw how ludicrous the claim of this disease was, the fear of it completely left me.