Testimony of Healing February 9, 2015 Issue

Severe back problem healed

Dean Coughtry

While running a small residential construction company, I once contracted to frame, roof, and enclose an expansion of a client’s home by turning a simple one-story cottage into a saltbox-style house. In early February, the deepest part of winter, we tore the roof off the house in preparation for framing the second story.

Previously I’d been experiencing discomfort in my back, but when I got home that night, the pain had increased so much that my oldest son had to help me carefully out of the car and slowly, haltingly into the bedroom upstairs. In bed I tried to sit up, but the effort caused such an agony that I could not move at all after that.

I felt frightened, grim. Would I ever walk again? Bound by pain, unable to move, I called a Christian Science practitioner for prayerful help. Then I began to read selections from No and Yes, Unity of Good, Christian Healing, and other writings by Mary Baker Eddy published in Prose Works. In her sermon The People’s Idea of God, she states, “… as we struggle through the cold night of physics, matter will become vague, and melt into nothing under the microscope of Mind” (p. 10). I found this comforting, as I felt Mrs. Eddy understood the kind of struggle I was facing and was pointing a path toward healing.