While in grade school I became fascinated with dinosaurs. I had read every book on the subject in our public library by the time I finished fifth grade. As life went on, however, I found other interests in the sciences, and it wasn’t until later adulthood, when I moved to a major city, that my early interest was rekindled. By this time I had also become a Christian Scientist.

During a visit to a museum, I discovered there was a paleontology club in that city and I joined. Later, I discovered that the museum accepted volunteers as fossil preparators, so I applied and was accepted. A preparator takes the rock specimens that have been gathered by field workers and liberates the fossils from the rock in which they’re embedded. Specimens may be anywhere from fist-sized to lounge-chair-sized, and the amount of work required is related to the size. 

It sounds like the old “sculpting an elephant joke,” but we actually use a miniature high-speed jackhammer to chip away everything that doesn’t look like bone. When we’re done, the fossil remains as a stony reflection of the original bone. I enjoyed the precision work, as well as seeing all the bones eventually come together into an assembled dinosaur skeleton and knowing that I had helped make it possible.

One evening at home I tripped and landed hard on my hand. I knew immediately from the pain that it was broken. By the next morning it was swollen and painful. I was used to relying on Christian Science for healing, and decided to pray for myself.

A few days later I went to the paleo lab for my weekly volunteer day. When I asked for help getting my heavy rock specimen off an upper shelf, the lab director immediately noticed my hand (now not so swollen, but misshapen to his experienced eye) and said: “Oh, your hand’s broken. You better get that taken care of soon. They’ll have to re-break your hand because it’s already started to fuse into the wrong shape. They’ll also have to put it in a cast.”

At this point I was—to turn a phrase—crushed. I sure didn’t want the pain. I didn’t want the cast. I didn’t want the expense. And I didn’t want the healing to be subject to all these conditions of matter. Feeling upset and dejected, I took my specimen to the bench and sat down to work on it. For a while I just sat there, unable to get started.

I finally realized I had been accepting the word of my lab director, who had pronounced this verdict on my hand. There was no malice in his act. He is highly intelligent, probably understands bone structure better than most doctors, and is a truly nice guy. But I also knew I had to let go of this verdict placed on my hand. I had my iPod with me, and on it I had put that week’s Christian Science Bible Lesson so that I could listen to it while driving. 

Now I listened to it while I worked. A nice thing about fossil preparatory work is that it gives plenty of time for thought, so I was able to concentrate fully on the Lesson. This was an interesting experience for me. Here I was, in a paleo lab, chipping away stone to retrieve a bone so that a skeleton of some long-ago creature could be reassembled and studied, but all the while I was listening to truths about who I really am.

I realized that I had something to understand that day, but it wasn’t based on bone. The director’s “verdict” was offered with true concern for my welfare, and not as some catastrophe or sentence on my well-being. So, as I listened to the Lesson, I was able to let go of my initial feeling that I had just been sentenced—or that I could be.

As I worked and listened and prayed, I began to see myself as God sees me: not some material, limited, flesh-and-bones creature, but His pure and perfect idea. That meant I was a spiritual being, because I knew I was made in God’s likeness and His likeness can only be spiritual. 

If there were any material element to God, then He would be finite, mortal, and subject to decay. That’s not a very good description of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present God. I began to know what I had experienced with my hand could not possibly be true of a spiritual being, or His idea—me.

The reality? My hand was a part of my spiritual expression, and spiritual expressions don’t “break.” So, not only was my hand not broken, it never had been. I realized that looking at my hand and seeing a broken object was seeing something completely unlike what God sees: my perfect selfhood. 

I began to understand that my hand is idea, not matter. Most important, I finally understood that if my hand was not broken, and was in fact unbreakable, then it would make no sense to see it as something that could ever be re-broken!

That must have been the most unusual thing ever to occur in a paleo lab. I was working on bone that is now stone, but not seeing bone as material at all! By the time the lab session ended, I was able to pick up the specimen and return it to the shelf. Healing was complete in my thought, and within days all vestiges of the pain in my hand left. It regained its normal shape and appearance, and functions without limitation of any kind.

And the lab director? He didn’t seem to notice that I returned my specimen to the shelf that day without assistance, and he never even brought up the subject again.

Biff Bigbie
Hideaway, Texas, US