Testimony of Healing May 23, 2011 Issue

Immobility dissolved

Barney Peters

At one point during the year 2008, I began to experience pain in my joints and muscles. At first I thought that it might have had something to do with my participation in gymnastics and other physical activities, which I had taken up about two years earlier after more than two decades of non-activity. As the days went on, however, this false sense manifested in what was an almost total incapacity to move, and then only with great difficulty. At one point my wife had to take several days off from work to care for me. Though the difficulty was never medically diagnosed, the symptoms were consistent with rheumatoid arthritis. 

Prior to and during this time I had been making great strides in my study of the weekly Christian Science Bible Lesson and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. Each day I was being spiritually uplifted by some thought or citation that I was contemplating. It was a sweet time and even though, as I recall, I could not even pick up the Bible and Science and Health with ease, I was confident that “Mind is the source of all movement, and there is no inertia to retard or check its perpetual and harmonious action” (Science and Health, p. 283).

Although I don’t recall the week or the particular subject of the Bible Lesson that proved instrumental in accelerating my path to healing, I do remember one citation that was central in my continuing search to understand God better: “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). As I prayed with this citation, I knew in my heart that it is always more than “joints and marrow” at issue in a Christian Science healing; it is what I hold in thought concerning God and my relation to Him that heals me in mind and in body. There were many other ideas that fed and sustained me all the while, but this one seemed to carry a “weight of glory” (II Cor. 4:17).

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