Testimony of Healing September 9, 2013 Issue

Healing and the family pet

Kaye Cover

Our household has always considered pets loved members of the family, and we regularly pray for them. My kids learned at an early age to apply what they were learning at the Christian Science Sunday School in their prayers for the pets. As the children grew up and faced challenges of their own, they could recall these early metaphysical experiences and remember the effectiveness of prayer.

My daughters were especially fond of our pet rats. Even though rats are often looked on as a nuisance and less than lovable, we learned they can also be sweet, tidy, tame, and intelligent. We found this to be true of our first pet rat, Tidbits. My daughters loved taking her for walks on a leash and for bike rides. Tidbits would often perch on one of my daughter’s shoulders. 

One day I noticed that Tidbits had a lump on her neck; it increased in size and became quite large. My daughters and I decided to rely on prayer for her care. We focused on all the Godlike qualities that Tidbits exhibited such as love, gentleness, and health. I also refuted as “mental malpractice”—the misdirected, sometimes ignorant, effort to harm or influence (see Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 451)—the belief that rats are inclined to certain health problems. Plus, I reasoned, if we accepted this illness as being real for an animal, we were opening the door to accepting that a person could suffer from this false belief, too.

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