About four years ago, while I was pregnant with our second child, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. When I received the diagnosis from the doctor’s office over the phone, I felt sure it was a mistake. 

The doctor required a second, more in-depth, test, before and during which I prayed until I became very aware that I was the expressed image of God. In Mary Baker Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the author says, “As a drop of water is one with the ocean, a ray of light one with the sun, even so God and man, Father and son, are one in being” (p. 361). 

Like that ray’s oneness with its source, I was one with God in nature and in essence—balanced, bright, and free of material measurements, positive or negative. Only God, divine Spirit, could tell me about my true being. I felt confident in that analogy likening me to a ray of light, one with my source—one with God, my true Father-Mother, who was also the true Father and Mother of the baby. 

A few days after the second test, I received another phone call confirming the original diagnosis. The doctor requested that I keep a dietary journal and get equipment for frequent blood testing. I hung up the phone utterly shaken, but also even more convinced this just had to be a mistake. 

And then it occurred to me with a flash of joy: It was a mistake! This troubling report simply was not true about me, whatever the test reported. I remembered a passage in Science and Health about mistaken information: “A blundering despatch, mistakenly announcing the death of a friend, occasions the same grief that the friend’s real death would bring. You think that your anguish is occasioned by your loss. Another despatch, correcting the mistake, heals your grief, and you learn that your suffering was merely the result of your belief. Thus it is with all sorrow, sickness, and death. You will learn at length that there is no cause for grief, and divine wisdom will then be understood. Error, not Truth, produces all the suffering on earth” (p. 386).

The truths resonant in that paragraph further strengthened my inner declaration of my spiritual nature and innocence. I felt even more clearly that the lie saying I was material and susceptible to disease and disorder would, by divine authority, be cleared up.

I agreed to comply with the blood testing and daily dietary record-keeping, but I didn’t consent to the concept that there would be anything to find in them.

Throughout the pregnancy, I talked often with a Christian Science practitioner, who prayed for me. At one point, feeling a bit as if I was in a type of lions’ den, I thought of the Bible’s account of Daniel’s experience and pondered it as one of protection. The practitioner reminded me that when what is spiritually true is clear to us, we know that there was no actual threat in the lions’ den. Nothing was present but divine Life, Truth, and Love. Daniel’s experience, like mine, was completely spiritual and governed by God, Spirit. So he was not subject to the mistaken terms, conditions, tricks, and threats of material selfhood. 

Each day I prayed with a growing certainty that this diagnosis of gestational diabetes was nothing but a mistaken prognosis. Each week the doctor checked my records and test results and said very little, occasionally commenting that things looked completely fine. But it became very important to me in these appointments not to be moved—by good opinions or fear of bad ones. As I became more interested in the spiritual, reality-based prayer I was doing with the practitioner, and in the growing expectancy of good, I became less impressed with the original diagnosis and any possible side effects or aftereffects. 

A few weeks before the baby was born, a nurse practitioner who saw me for just one visit looked over all the several weeks of test records and dietary journal entries. She saw nothing to be concerned about at that time or in the future, and we went on to chat casually. 

When our baby daughter was born, the nurses were required to test her blood after her every meal during our stay in the hospital. They never found anything out of the ordinary with her and didn’t test me again.

After this experience, I deepened the lessons learned by continuing to understand that “God is natural good …” (Science and Health, p. 119). As God’s emanations, the baby and I could both feel and express God’s goodness. Good is, after all, our natural state, and that is no mistake!

Michele Sitterly 
Melbourne, Florida, US