Testimony of Healing May 4, 2020 Issue

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.