This healing took place during the fall semester of my freshman year in college, but in a sense it started during the spring of my senior year in high school. 

During those last months prior to my high school graduation, I had a longing to know myself better as God’s child and to leave behind the daily anxiety and pressure from feeling that I couldn’t measure up. My high school was a tough private prep school that fostered intense competition, and I always felt just average. 

I reached out more in prayer to God and started to attend Wednesday evening testimony meetings at the branch Church of Christ, Scientist, that my family attended. I loved listening to the readings from the Bible and from the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and also to the testimonies given by fellow churchgoers, which included all types of healings, some of them dramatic. I recognize now that from that desire to know myself better as God’s child, I experienced greater calm and performed better academically and socially. 

By the time I headed to college, I was already learning to lean on God for everything. As a result, I found my experience filled with new, loving friendships and fulfilling school experiences. Life in general was changing in expansive ways, and my understanding of God as my all-loving Parent and guide continued to grow. And this growing understanding of my dear relationship to my Father-Mother God was a major contributor to a healing I experienced of measles. 

In October of my freshman year I had what appeared to be flu-like symptoms as well as a high fever. I stayed in bed, thinking it all would be fine. I became increasingly weak, however, and my roommate became concerned. She asked me to go to the health-care facility on campus to get help. I agreed, but I could barely walk and needed two friends to hold me up as we went. A nurse who examined me said she saw signs of measles. 

When I was a child, my parents took me to get vaccinated, and they made sure we were fully in compliance with our state’s existing health laws. So it was a surprise to get this diagnosis. When the nurse asked me to contact my parents, I did so, and then for the first time in my life, I also contacted a Christian Science practitioner to pray for me. I chose someone close to the college, which turned out to be a huge blessing. Health inspectors were called in, and the diagnosis was confirmed. I was given no medication, but was quarantined, and everyone on campus was alerted.

Right after making the phone calls, I fell unconscious and remained so for close to 24 hours, with some brief periods awake. Each time I awoke, I saw the Christian Science practitioner sitting next to me praying, and what I heard and held in thought was simply the powerful idea that God is Love. The sense of my true selfhood as God’s precious, loved child had grown so much in my thought previous to this incident that it was natural for me to hear that message and yield to it with childlike trust, supported by the prayers of the practitioner, my parents, and friends. 

The truth that God is Love was all I needed for healing, and by the time I fully awoke the next day, I was completely healed. I had palpably felt the transforming power of Love right there. It was the purest sense of my oneness with Love, God, who created, cared for, and maintained my life. 

When the nurse saw me moving freely around my room the next day, she examined me and told me that there were no more marks on my back and that I had no fever or remaining signs of the disease. I was eager to get back to my active college life. Once the one-week quarantine period was up, a state health inspector came and pronounced me healthy and able to go back to my dorm. Another wonderful outcome of this healing was that there were no more incidents of this supposedly contagious disease reported and no indication of concerns about it on campus that year. 

As I’ve continued to grow in my understanding and practice of Christian Science for myself and now my children, I’ve learned that divine Principle, Love, alone heals. Our job is to be a transparency for divine Love, free from matter-based beliefs in contagion and viruses, and other beliefs in physical laws. God’s spiritual laws—including health, harmony, completeness, and love—are the only laws truly operating in anyone’s life, and these laws are consistent and flawless. We can confidently affirm daily, moment by moment, what Christ Jesus taught, and yield to the truth of this statement by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of the Science of Christ: “It is neither Science nor Truth which acts through blind belief, nor is it the human understanding of the divine healing Principle as manifested in Jesus, whose humble prayers were deep and conscientious protests of Truth,—of man’s likeness to God and of man’s unity with Truth and Love” (Science and Health, p. 12).

Audrey Whitfield MacKenzie 
Dallas, Texas, US