Healed of nail puncture in boyhood

Patrick J. Barrett

I grew up in Southern California, where the summers were warm and I often went barefoot. One day when I was in elementary school, I stepped on a rusty nail. I came into the house and asked my mom for help.

Having attended a Christian Science Sunday School for several years, I was used to praying to solve problems. My mom had given me a shorthand approach to prayer. She would say, “Deny the error; declare the truth; and put it out of your thinking.” By “it” she meant whatever the problem was. This was a succinct reminder of things I had learned at home and in Sunday School. To me, to “deny the error” meant to declare in my thought that anything that didn’t come from God was an error—not real in God’s eyes. In the present case, I could deny that God had put a nail through my foot or that He would cause any discomfort. Therefore, I should not accept it as real, but rather as an error to be rejected.

The next step said to me to identify in my thought what is true in God’s eyes, and to affirm that since God is Truth, all that He knows is what is true. One truth in this situation was that I was a creation of God (as it says in Genesis 1), and that the only things that were true about me were what God created. I knew that since God is Spirit (see John 4:24) and I am God’s creation, I am spiritual. And since what God created is “very good” (Genesis 1: 31), it could not include an injury.

Finally, I didn’t need to think about it (the problem with the foot) any further.

I went to my bedroom and flopped onto my stomach on my bed, with my feet in the air. I started to read a book. Meanwhile, my mom was praying. Though I do not know what she was praying, this statement from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy is one we often prayed with: “A spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive” (p. 463). As God’s creation, each of us is “a spiritual idea,” and the truth that we are free from error can remove any thought of an accident or bad consequences (“whatever is offensive”) from our consciousness and our experience.

After a while, my mom came into my room and saw that the puncture wound had closed and could hardly be seen. I suffered no aftereffects from stepping on the nail and today don’t recall which foot was injured. For many years after this incident, my mom liked to tell of this experience. I have continued to study Christian Science since that time and have found it a help in all aspects of my life.

Patrick J. Barrett
Palo Alto, California, US

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