When a neighbor mentioned Christian Science

I want to share some of my joy about having been introduced to Christian Science. 

My wife and I were living in a small rented house as we built a house about 25 miles away. While we were doing that, a woman living in a home behind ours told my wife about Christian Science. The woman mentioned that her sister was a Christian Science practitioner, someone who devotes their time to treating patients mentally through prayer. When my wife first mentioned Christian Science to me, I said it was silly. But we had been looking for a church in the area and could not agree with the doctrine of the churches we had visited. So, when our neighbor invited us to a Christian Science lecture, I decided to go with my wife. 

I was quite taken by the lecturer’s talk. The concept that we are God’s spiritual ideas, eternal, living in God’s spiritual universe, was completely new to me. The book he introduced, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, explains this and other teachings of Christian Science in depth—for example, on page 509: “God forms and peoples the universe. The light of spiritual understanding gives gleams of the infinite only, even as nebulæ indicate the immensity of space.” In chapter 21 of the Bible’s book of Revelation, St. John writes of a new heaven and a new earth, and of “the holy city, new Jerusalem” (verse 2), having no need of sun or moon, where God is the source of light. The idea that light comes from God enlightened me and brought me spiritual understanding.