Symptoms of severe illness gone
Before I embraced Christian Science, I worked for one of the richest oil companies in Nigeria. Every staff member was given preventive drugs against malaria each weekend, which we called “Sunday medicine,” because we took the medicine on Sunday.
Since I became a student of Christian Science, and a class-taught student in 1987, I have relied on prayer for healing. And I had not had a serious fever until the one I had in May of 2006.
For more than three nights, I had a severe fever that included weakness and loss of appetite. Since I know no other name for error or mortal suggestion than “nothingness,” as it is not from divine Mind, God, I did not get it diagnosed. I decided to rely on prayer in Christian Science for healing.
Relations who visited me asked me to go for a medical check-up. As a Christian Scientist, I considered this statement in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, “We think that we are healed when a disease disappears, though it is liable to reappear; but we are never thoroughly healed until the liability to be ill is removed” (p. 230 ).
I not only wanted to be free from the symptoms of illness, but I also wanted the liability to be ill to be completely removed. I started by challenging my beliefs about mosquitoes that claim to cause diseases. I imagined the size of the smallest man and that of the biggest mosquito—and asked myself where my dominion was if a small insect could make me sick. I read in the Bible and saw that man’s dominion has been intact, right from the creation of the earth, “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28 ). Right here, I realized that I had not claimed my rightful position, which God has given man—dominion. I entered into prayer to know more of God and man.
I understood that man’s dominion bestowed on him by his Maker cannot be taken from him. I discovered that getting back my dominion was not my problem, but the liability to be ill needed to be handled because this liability involves my own thinking. The way I think of myself and my body should not make any room for false beliefs. Some of these beliefs are educated beliefs from biology, hygiene, all the way up to medical instructions about germs all over man and his environment. Looking at the world in this way, it appears as if man is no longer safe wherever he is.
As a student of Christian Science, I turned to Science and Health by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, a book that she ordained to be Pastor of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, along with the Bible. She wrote, “The material body, which you call me, is mortal mind, and this mind is material in sensation, even as the body, which has originated from this material sense and been developed according to it, is material” (p. 416 ).
I now saw that I was seeing two of me. One as a child of God and the other “me,” mortal mind’s flawed and painful view, yet I was claiming that mortal mind has no place in man. I saw that the mistaken “me” was a wrong concept of man, and so was the liability to be ill. It was not really about insects or what they seem to produce. Following the Pastor, I read two statements that led me onward on the straight and narrow way: “Think less of material conditions and more of spiritual” (p. 419 ) and “Remove the leading error or governing fear of this lower so-called mind, and you remove the cause of all disease as well as the morbid or excited action of any organ. You also remove in this way what are termed organic diseases as readily as functional difficulties” (p. 377 ).
On thinking more about the spiritual, and realizing that I cannot be separated from God or my spiritual being, this thought flashed into my consciousness, “Can I be sick when God and man are as one, and spiritual being is perfect?” This truth raised me above my confused thinking and I saw my untouched spiritual perfection and well-being, confirming that “… nothing inharmonious can enter being …” (Science and Health, p. 228 ).
That evening I was able to eat my meal and felt normal again. I was healed.
Joseph Ozioma Ugboaja-Nwosu
Oyigbo, Rivers State, Nigeria
