I used to live out in the country, and when I turned 16, I got a horse, a mare. She was a wonderful friend, and we had many good times together. 

One day my horse stepped on a nail. It was many inches long, and it lodged itself straight up into her foot. I called a vet to get it out and began to affirm my horse’s God-given perfection. 

The next day after the nail was pulled out, my horse could barely walk, and the day after that she was even worse off. I began to be afraid. Instead of turning to God to treat this situation through prayer, as was always my practice, I decided to rely on Animal Science. So I took my horse to a large animal clinic. 

The third day she was there, after there had been no improvement, I was standing with my horse. There were three veterinarians there endeavoring to help and talking together about her. I listened in to hear what they thought. One stated that if I took her home, she would die. The second said things could go either way—good or bad—and the third said he thought it would be all right to take her home. It was instantly obvious to me that only human opinion, and not the truth of the laws of God, was at work there. I saw that I could not rely on opinions at all to provide me with accurate information about my horse’s well-being. I needed to listen to the unerring, clear guidance of God, divine Love. 

I called a friend who had a trailer and took my horse home immediately. Upon reaching home, I called a Christian Science practitioner and requested Christian Science treatment. She helped me recognize that there had never been a moment when my mare had been out of God’s care. She was always and would always be governed entirely by the laws of God, which include no accident or human opinion. In the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes, “God gives the lesser idea of Himself for a link to the greater, and in return, the higher always protects the lower” (p. 518). 

I saw that my job was to protect my horse by protecting my own thought from any sense of separation from God; in other words, from any sense of a broken link between God and His creation. We are inseparable from God as His ideas, so nothing can come into our experience that can break that connection or cause us to turn away from our true source of good, our creator. 

The Christian Science practitioner and I prayed diligently together, and I spoke all of these spiritual ideas out loud to my horse as I spent time with her. In two days, she was able to walk normally again, and that was the end of the problem.

This was a landmark healing for me. It showed so obviously that I had been duped into believing that Christian Science works for me, but wouldn’t necessarily work when it comes to animals. Through this experience I learned that Christian Science heals. Period. It works; and we can believe it, know it, and demonstrate it.

Erin O’Kelly Bourcier
Englewood, Colorado, US