Testimony of Healing February 5, 2018 Issue

Wasp sting healed

Cindy White Zwick

My husband and I were excited about an evening out in the city at the symphony. We live on an island and take a ferry across the bay. While my husband was parking the car, I was paying at the parking kiosk. When I reached into my purse, I felt an excruciating pain at the end of my ring finger. Looking down, I saw a yellow jacket still attached to my hand, and the pain was increasing. Brushing the insect off, my husband and I proceeded into the terminal to wait for the ferry, but I have to admit that my anticipated joy in the outing felt spoiled. 

I knew I needed to turn to prayer and counter the aggressive suggestion that one of God’s creatures could harm me. My first step was to find a quiet corner and claim my spiritual selfhood. I did this by understandingly repeating “the scientific statement of being” found in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. It begins, “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter” (p. 468). I contemplated each of those words—no life in matter, so I reasoned that there was no life (no animating force) to the claim of a harmful, stinging insect, since God and His creation are good. There was no truth in the material world’s claim that one of God’s ideas can attack another of God’s ideas. There was no intelligence exhibited in this whole fable of hurt, harm, or fear. And, finally, my substance was spiritual, not material, therefore not subject to material cause or effect. 

By the time we needed to board the ferry, I was free from the claim of pain, but then it appeared that my finger was swelling up rather alarmingly. These words from Science and Health came to me: “Have no fear that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed as the result of a law of any kind, when it is self-evident that matter can have no pain nor inflammation” (p. 393). Again I reasoned that the only law in effect was the law of God, good, harmony, and that law can’t result in misery. I repeated my assertion that I was not a matter-based mortal, but a spiritual idea. It was absurd that my finger could be anything but perfectly formed. Within moments, the swelling dissolved. 

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