One afternoon a few years ago, I was clearing weeds on my steep backyard hillside with a heavy, motorized weed trimmer. The weeds were slippery from a recent rain and almost waist high. Because I couldn’t see the contour of the slope, I slipped and fell, crying out in surprise. While falling, I had accidentally slammed the metal pole of the heavy tool into my hipbone. The pain was intense. 

At first, I worried that I might have broken my hip—not a happy prospect—but then decided that the injury wasn’t that severe. Next, the thought came that if only I had spent some time in prayer and in study of the Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly that morning, maybe I would have been able to avoid this injury. Finally, I thought that maybe now I’d need to pray to know there never had been an accident, or something like that. This was the exact state of my consciousness at the time—not very enlightened.

As I sat there alone on the hillside in the late afternoon sun, dirt and grass stains on my clothes, feeling like a klutz for having hurt myself, suddenly, an overwhelming sense of the presence of Love—of God—came over me.