I tried pressing my fingers apart, sitting on them, wearing gloves, and even running cold water over them. Nothing stopped the itching, at least not for long. I was in seventh grade and had a severe case of poison ivy.

"Why don't you walk over to Grandma's," Mom suggested. As a Christian Scientist, I was relying on prayer for healing but hadn't prayed much myself. I expected my parents' prayers to do the job.

Since I'd made only a little progress, I took my mom's advice and went to visit Grandma. My grandmother often helped me and my brother and cousins pray. She lived just down the road from us. When I walked inside, she was sitting in her favorite chair reading Science and Health, a book that explains how Jesus healed through prayer and how we can do the same.

Grandma stood up and took my hands in hers and held them. She beamed at me as I frowned. I felt the warmth of her smile radiating at me, soft and comforting like the early afternoon sun streaming through her living room window. She rested her cheek against mine despite the rash that covered half of my face.

"Poison ivy," I grumbled, glancing down at my fingers. Grandma continued to hold my hands in hers.

"You're looking in the wrong place for healing," she said, guessing correctly that I was focusing too much on the ugly rash on my hands. This distracted me from praying, from seeing myself as God's loved daughter—pure and whole and not subject to disease.

"Now what does God know about you?" Grandma asked. I thought a minute, and remembered how, according to the book of Genesis in the Bible, God created His children perfect. The verse reads, "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). The creation account in Genesis also mentions that God was satisfied with His work.

"God doesn't create disease," I said. I realized, too, that if God was satisfied with me, I could certainly be satisfied with myself.

"That's right. That means that if God didn't create it, you can't have it. Just like 2 + 2 isn't 5, you aren't diseased. But you have to do the math," Grandma said firmly.

By "do the math," Grandma meant that I could claim my right to health. I could reject the lie that God's creation—me—could be made to suffer and feel bad. Every time this thought came to me, I could replace it with the spiritual fact that my birthright was health and freedom. "I want to show you something," Grandma said. "Wait here."

Grandma went into her sewing room and returned with a red ball of yarn. "Hold out your hand." I obediently extended a hand. Grandma cut a piece of red string and tied it in a bow around my index finger. "Now when you look at this string, I want you to think of how much God loves you—too much to cause disease." I smiled. As Grandma and I talked, the burning in my hands had stopped.

We prayed together with "the scientific statement of being" from Science and Health. It begins: "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all" (p. 468). We acknowledged that we were spiritual ideas, not made of matter, and could look to God, not the body, to tell us what was true about me. I liked the idea that I was the manifestation, or expression, of God's being.

I gave Grandma a hug and began the walk home through the tall summer grass. As I walked, I glanced down at the red string. I remembered God's humongous love for me, and I felt comforted and loved.

That night I slept peacefully without itching. I stopped looking at my hands to monitor the poison ivy. In a few days it was completely gone.

Interestingly, I never got poison ivy again as a kid and neither did any of the other kids in my family!