A few years ago, I had—based on descriptions I’d heard or read—a urinary tract infection. It was painful, and after some months of on-and-off prayerful work, the symptoms were gone. However, after several months they reappeared, and more strongly than before. 

This time I prayed with ideas I found in each week’s Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly. Each lesson comprises passages from the Bible and from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. One of these ideas was a verse from a psalm, and I considered how it applied to me: “Mark the perfect man [including me], and behold the upright: for the end of that man [for my end] is peace” (Psalms 37:37). 

I also had been doing prayerful work for other people, with thoughts such as this one found in Science and Health: “A spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive” (p. 463). This truth applied to me as well as to those others for whom I was praying.