When I was on a business trip several years ago, a painful condition in my side was again making me feel very uncomfortable. I had been struggling with this problem for a long time. Having faith in what Christian Science could do for me, I decided to again call a Christian Science practitioner for treatment through prayer. I expected to be healed, because I had experienced so much healing over the years. Yet this problem had not yet yielded. 

I reached the practitioner and complained about living with this discomfort as well as facing other challenges. These challenges included a stressful work environment in a new field of research, the obligations of a growing family of young children, responsibilities at church, and concerns about the world we live in. Her straightforward response to my complaints startled me: “So, do you want to keep living in that stressful world?” This question made me realize I didn’t have to live in the world I was describing.

Many of us are familiar with the expression, “Be in the world, but not of it”—which takes on new meaning when we see, through spiritual sense, that we actually live in God’s perfect, spiritual universe and that we have the power to perceive it. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures we read: “The adult, in bondage to his beliefs, no more comprehends his real being than does the child; and the adult must be taken out of his darkness, before he can get rid of the illusive sufferings which throng the gloaming. The way in divine Science is the only way out of this condition” (Mary Baker Eddy, p. 371). Progress in seeing spiritually rather than accepting a material sense of being was my ticket to freedom from suffering. The physical malady did not disappear immediately, but this was the beginning of the end of the difficulty. I realized that my true selfhood was never in matter but was always one with the Father, God, Spirit.