At different times over the years I have had discomfort in one ankle or the other resulting from past injuries. When I again began to feel pain one night late last summer, this passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy came to me: “Suffer no claim of sin or of sickness to grow upon the thought. Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more the author of sickness than He is of sin” (p. 390).

As I thought about this statement, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to make this conviction abide in me; the conviction about what is spiritually real and what is not comes from God, and therefore is always abiding within me. At that moment, I felt it deeply and thought it must be similar to the conviction the disciple Peter had when he declared that Jesus was the Christ (see Matthew 16:15–18). 

I also knew from my study of Christian Science that “the kingdom of God is within you,” as Jesus declared (Luke 17:21). I have found that as we learn more of Jesus’ teaching regarding the kingdom of God, or heaven, we begin to know that all attributes of God—such as patience, meekness, and temperance—are always abiding in us, so we can feel them with conviction. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, “When the fear subsides and the conviction abides that you have broken no law, neither rheumatism, consumption, nor any other disease will ever result from exposure to the weather” (p. 384).