Testimony of Healing June 10, 2019 Issue

Alcoholism healed

Sharon Dec

My husband struggled with alcoholism during the first few years of our marriage. He was not a Christian Scientist and had not asked for Christian Science treatment, so I prayed for myself daily to see the man of God’s creating—to see beyond the material appearance and to see the good, pure man I had married. On numerous occasions I also called on a Christian Science practitioner to pray for me, but the problem continued.

After a night out, my husband would remember nothing from the night before except what Mary Baker Eddy describes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as “a suffering inconceivably terrible to man’s self-respect” (p. 407). I thought about leaving him, and even visited a lawyer, but I just couldn’t do it.

Then one night my husband came home so drunk that he fell at my feet. As I helped him up, I suddenly felt this overwhelming sense of Christly compassion and affection for him. It was different from feeling sorry for him—this compassion wasn’t the result of seeing him as a poor, struggling mortal. Instead, it was inspired by what I knew to be true about his real selfhood as God’s child. This pure love was not my personal, human love but the universal, perfect love of God, who is Love itself. Since we all are our Father’s children and share this love, we can’t help but respond to it and express it—which is exactly what happened.

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