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.”

Mary Baker Eddy declares that Jesus’ humble prayers were “deep and conscientious protests of Truth,—of man’s likeness to God and of man’s unity with Truth and Love” (Science and Health, p. 12). To follow the example of Christ Jesus was my desire, so I, too, took up deep and conscientious protests of Truth, of my granddaughter’s intact spiritual substance as God’s image and likeness. Her wholeness, harmony, unbreakable spiritual structure, and perfect relationship to God were immutable and permanent. Material belief had no authority or power to alter or place conditions on God or His spiritual ideas.

A recent copy of The Christian Science Journal lay on the table in front of me, and I opened it to a testimony by Jack Train titled “ ‘I let go of the battle’ ” (September 2013). I pondered deeply the ideas shared, and I felt comforted by the thought that the same healing truths experienced by the writer of the testimony were lived by Christ Jesus and were available to me and my granddaughter at that moment. I, too, refused to identify with a mortal sense of self that could be impressed or anxious over the matter-illusion of accident. I would not give legitimacy to a lie about God’s perfect government by thinking of accident or injury as a real enemy that needed to be battled. Just as an untruth in arithmetic can never make itself true, no matter how many times it is written on paper, so a lie of mortal-mindedness cannot make itself the truth about God’s spiritual image and likeness, no matter what form it takes.

Next I turned my attention to that week’s Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly. The healing truths abounded, and I drank in the inspiration. In Psalms, I read, “It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way perfect” (18:32). I reasoned that it is God who girds my granddaughter with unbreakable, solid spiritual ideas as the structure of her being, making her way perfect, day in and day out.

The book of Revelation states: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people .... there shall be no more ... crying, neither shall there be any more pain: ... Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:3–5). I bowed my head in gratitude for this promise from God. I was filled with the conviction that God’s power in the human experience is always operative, renewing, restoring, and manifesting all that coincides with the entirety of God’s goodness, making evident for everyone to see that which is good, holy, whole.

The next evening my son called and reported that during the visit to the pediatrician, a second X-ray was ordered, and on viewing it, the surgeon who had planned to set the finger said this new X-ray showed no break. He stated that the finger was bruised and would be sore for a few days. A prior prognosis of six weeks in a cast was dismissed, and my granddaughter was sent home with a lollipop instead of a cast. That night, she moved her finger freely and picked things up painlessly. When we gathered for a family event three days later, there was no evidence that any injury had ever taken place.

My gratitude for this example of God’s healing presence and power is overflowing. Our family was blessed by proof that “as in heaven, so on earth,—God is omnipotent, supreme.”

Gareth Montgomery
Yucaipa, California, US