I would like to express my gratitude for an instantaneous healing I experienced four or five years ago that continues to act as a beacon of inspiration to me. 

One day while visiting with family at my mother-in-law’s house, I started to feel a headache coming on. Over the course of the day, it gradually gained in strength until the evening, when I had to excuse myself from dinner, as I wanted to lie down. However, the pain had grown so intense that any change in position made it worse, and sitting or lying down seemed impossible. 

I had been studying Christian Science for about ten years, having learned about it through my husband, who is a lifelong Christian Scientist, and whose mother is a Christian Science practitioner. Because we live so far away, our time with her is precious, made even more so because of the love she expresses and shares. I knew that it was right to expect only joy during our visit. 

I tried my best to apply what I knew about God as infinite Love and about myself as a child of that divine Love. But focusing on these truths through the pain was difficult. I soon heard my mother-in-law call to me from the stairs, “I’m going to get right to work.” Her “work” was her prayer, her spiritual understanding and affirmation of God’s care. Immediately I felt a wave of gratitude and peace, because I knew that even if my own consciousness was cloudy, her clear understanding would help open my thinking to the light of Truth, God. 

I heard my mother-in-law’s bedroom door shut, and for the first time in about an hour of intense pain, I could lie down. I felt so peaceful that I wanted to close my eyes and go to sleep. But in that moment, I realized that the pain had completely disappeared—I was healed. I didn’t want to lie down. I jumped out of bed, ran downstairs to my family, and with my hands raised triumphantly above my head told them, “I’m healed!”

When I asked my mother-in-law what she had been praying with, she shared with me this statement from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: “Christian Scientists must live under the constant pressure of the apostolic command to come out from the material world and be separate” (p. 451).

I had often heard this statement, but now I understood it in a new light. When I was growing up, headaches were a frequent possibility, which I always planned for by bringing painkillers with me wherever I went. But since this healing, I’ve been praying to separate myself from the belief in a material world in which pain and suffering are seen as inevitable. My study of Christian Science has taught me that what needs to be healed isn’t the headache itself, but the belief that I can have a headache or any pain that can separate me from God. I am learning that there can be no possibility of pain in a world created by divine Love—the universe of divine Spirit, in which all is spiritual and good.  

Since this experience, headaches have become much less frequent for me, and if I do feel one coming on, I am able to heal it quickly through my growing understanding and conviction that as a child of divine Love, I live entirely separate from matter. 

Jessica Russo 
St. Paul, Minnesota, US