A few days before Christmas 2019, I experienced a sudden loss of mobility. Pain accompanied any attempt to sit up or move my legs from the bed, even with my dear husband’s gentle lifting. As their Christmas gift, our children had invited us to join them the next day at a special New York City restaurant, followed by box seats at an annual concert. The reservations and tickets had been acquired many months earlier.

I called a Christian Science practitioner to ask for prayerful treatment. After I told her of my inability to move and my fear that I might have to cancel these wonderful family plans, she said, “God is more to you than your belief.” She was referring to a statement in the textbook of Christian Science, authored by Mary Baker Eddy: “God is more to a man than his belief, and the less we acknowledge matter or its laws, the more immortality we possess” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 425).

That caught my attention and caused some soul-searching on my part. From then on I tried to give more thought to prayer and less to the incapacity and pain. The next morning, though, I reported to the practitioner that there had been no improvement and that I was going to have to cancel our Christmas plans. She asked me to ponder the following: “Jesus acted boldly, against the accredited evidence of the senses . . .” (Science and Health, p. 18).