Testimony of Healing March 12, 2007 Issue

A RENEWED CONFIDENCE IN CHRISTIAN SCIENCE BRINGS HEALING

MATT SCHMIDT

A few years ago, I was working for the Peace Corps in a small village in Eastern Africa, along the lakeshore of Malawi. I lived a simple life with no cellphone, Internet, electricity, or piped water. Although being in a remote location made contact with family and friends in the United States difficult, my new neighbors in Malawi helped me feel at home. They always expressed great kindness and compassion toward me, inviting me to share meals and visit them frequently.

One day, inspired to show hospitality to a friend, I scheduled dinner with him at my house. That afternoon, I was working outside with basic carpentry hand tools, trying to make a simple piece of furniture. As I was cutting a board of beautiful hardwood, it slipped off the workbench and landed on the soft top part of my foot. I was wearing flip-flops at the time, which offered little protection from the impact of the board. I remember hearing a cracking sound in my foot and feeling that something had shifted. My foot became painful to move or put weight on. I immediately turned my thought away from pain and acceptance of this injury, to the renewing power of God's love.

Although as a child I'd attended Christian Science Sunday School, I'd just recently become reacquainted with Christian Science before leaving the United States for Malawi. I'd been to visit a Christian Scientist who lived a few hours away from my home, and he lent me a book called A Century of Christian Science Healing (The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966). The examples of healing in the book gave me a renewed confidence in Christian Science healing. And I had been inspired by this passage in Science and Health: "The confidence inspired by Science lies in the fact that Truth is real and error is unreal" (p. 368).