Testimony of Healing May 6, 2013 ISSUE

Removal of fear yields healing

Emily Sander

Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “If you succeed in wholly removing the fear, your patient is healed” (p. 411–412 ). What a powerful thought! I want to share an experience that really brought this idea to my attention for the first time.

Five years ago, I was living in a foreign country and my menstrual period stopped for three months. At first, it didn’t worry me and I didn’t think much about it. However, as the weeks went by, I started to be afraid that something was actually wrong.

One afternoon, I remembered that my host mom had told me months earlier about how someone in her family had experienced a similar situation when traveling abroad, and that she’d been told it was related to malnutrition. I never knew how her situation got resolved, but all I knew was that this individual continued to see a doctor about it. 

At the time, I wasn’t confident in my ability to pray for physical healing through Christian Science, so I decided to look online to see if I could find any easy diet-related remedies. I didn’t get very far into this search before I had a gut feeling that I wasn’t going about handling this issue in the best way for me. From the little I’d read, I sensed I was at the “tip of an iceberg,” where, if I continued to read, I would encounter complicated and sometimes alarming information that ultimately didn’t coincide with what I truly believed about health and the nature of man. As soon as I realized that, I decided not to pursue this course any longer and got off the computer.

Well, I now knew how I didn’t want to handle this situation, but I still wasn’t sure how I was going handle it. Although I had been raised going to a Christian Science Sunday School, my attention to Christian Science had waned a lot, and it seemed like ages since I’d thought much about God. But it still occurred to me to acknowledge God as my protection and to trust that I was and always would be taken care of. 

Because it had been a while since I’d seen myself as cared for like this, it was particularly comforting to think about such a familiar idea—almost like meeting an old friend after spending a long time apart. This was enough of a relief that I stopped worrying and saw no reason to think about this situation anymore. I dropped the issue entirely and just went about my day, not expecting any particular result but just feeling willing to trust that God was taking care of me.

Later that day, my period started. I’d been confident that God was caring for me, but I wasn’t expecting a resolution to happen so soon! The experience confirmed for me that I was right not to fear—I just hadn’t realized, until that moment, that it would have such a healing effect—and a permanent one, at that. The simplicity and immediacy of this experience also showed me that the practice of Christian Science doesn’t have to be complicated.

Emily Sander
Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, US

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