Article June 23, 2003 Issue

REALIZATIONS that brought freedom and healing

By Kenneth Girard

IN THE SPRING OF 2001, I noticed a growth developing on the interior of one of my eyelids. It was somewhat alarming, and I turned to prayer, which was my normal inclination since I've been studying Science and Health. And I prayed with the ideas I read. I realized that I needed to get a deeper sense of God and His care and love for me, and for all of His children. But the growth continued to expand, and I realized that I needed to get the help of a good friend who is a Christian Science practitioner—that's someone who prays for healing. And so this friend prayed with me.

One of the fears that I needed to pray about was that my paternal grandmother had had a similar condition, diagnosed as cancer in both of her eyelids. So I had to think about hereditary disease. There's a wonderful statement in Science and Health that says, "Heredity is a prolific subject for mortal belief to pin theories upon; but if we learn that nothing is real but the right, we shall have no dangerous inheritances, and fleshly ills will disappear" (p. 228). I asked, Did heredity have a hold on me, and was I going to be affected by it?

I thought and prayed about this. And I thought, Well, if God is my eternal Father and Mother —and I know that He is—then His is the only inheritance I can be affected by. I also had to realize that my dear grandmother could not have been affected by this condition either, because this would be a false image of who God made her to be. Even though she had passed away 20 years before, I knew it was important to negate that false image about her. It wasn't true about her in God's sight—the way He created her, the way she spiritually really was. This was a very freeing realization to me, and in a span of about two weeks, this growth started to diminish. Finally, it disappeared completely. There wasn't a trace of it.

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