Article September 25, 2006 Issue

Next in our biweekly series on how people have nurtured their public practice of Christian Science.

ANYONE CAN BE A HEALER

HEALING—A CHILDHOOD BEGINNING

DON WALLINGFORD—Lilburn, Georgia

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my parents would often ask me to pray for them. More than any other influence, it was these early requests that made praying for someone else feel natural to me.

I have a distinct early memory of one occasion when I took my copies of the Bible and Science and Health into a quiet part of the house to pray for my dad. I recall that he was dealing with a condition affecting his leg and that he was soon healed. That experience also marked my own awakening to what the presence of God, Love, feels like: warm and strong, yet humbling. From then on, my connection to the practice of spiritual healing was established. Praying for others must necessarily include experiencing God's closeness oneself, and I realized even then that this was more than thinking about God. For me, it was like standing on holy ground in His presence.

That simple, yet conscious awareness of being in God's sight carried over into my teens. I could feel His goodness, although I had doubts about my own. One day I was sitting in the back seat of a car, listening to my dad talk with a longtime friend who was a Christian Science practitioner. They were talking about the responsibility of keeping one's thought pure. I said, "I sure don't think my thoughts are pure. I have all kinds of thoughts I'm not proud of." The practitioner turned toward me, and, with what I felt was true compassion, said, "Don, you aren't responsible for those thoughts. You're only responsible for what you do with them." He said I could choose to keep them and let them shape my character, or because God loved me, I could refuse them and choose something else.

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