Testimony of Healing February 3, 2014 Issue

Finger mended quickly

Gareth Montgomery

When leaving work recently, I received a text message from my daughter-in-law saying that my granddaughter had broken her pinky knuckle. Ava and her twin brother, Tyler, are my 22-month-old grandchildren. Tyler had accidentally shut a door on his sister’s hand. An X-ray at an urgent care clinic showed that the finger was broken, and Ava was not able to move her finger or pick anything up. Instructions were given to visit the pediatrician the following day. I briefly Skyped with the family, told my granddaughter how much I loved her, and asked if I could pray for her. My son said yes.

As a lifelong Christian Scientist, I knew that sympathy and human love were not enough to heal my granddaughter’s pain. With my whole heart, I wanted her to experience God’s healing truth and love. I turned to prayer to quiet my fears and doubts. In the chapter on prayer in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy instructs, “Lips must be mute and materialism silent, that man may have audience with Spirit, the divine Principle, Love, which destroys all error” (p. 15). To silence materialism and its aggressive picture of accident and injury, I recognized that every thought I held of my granddaughter must be derived from God, divine Mind. There was no room for rumination on endless “What ifs?”

I embraced this line from the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). In Science and Health, Eddy gives her spiritual interpretation, “Enable us to know,—as in heaven, so on earth,—God is omnipotent, supreme” (p. 17). I claimed that right now I was able to know the reign of one, all-embracing divine Principle or Lawgiver, Love, and so was my granddaughter. Because God is omnipotent, there could be no double standard—harmony in heaven but discord and pain on earth. No! I affirmed that God’s perpetual good, harmony, and wholeness were reigning in my granddaughter’s experience, “as in heaven, so on earth.”