There was a time when I was working as a Christian Science nurse in a Christian Science nursing facility and felt weary and burdened. Toward the end of one shift, as we were moving a patient with a Hoyer lifter, the heavy metal base accidentally hit my ankle. 

The pain was intense, and I could barely walk, but I immediately started silently praying. The thought that came to me was “Love is not puffed up”; I knew that the caring I was doing for the patients was filled with love for them and could not result in an injury to me. 

I was able to finish the shift, but by the time I got home my foot was swollen, and I could not walk or even get a shoe on. Later I looked up the phrase that had come to me, which originates in one of Paul’s epistles in the Bible, and found it in a letter that Mary Baker Eddy wrote to members of The Mother Church, as published in her Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896: “Know ye not that he who exercises the largest charity, and waits on God, renews his strength, and is exalted? Love is not puffed up; . . .” (p. 130).