One day I helped a lady get back to her apartment, because she was having difficulty walking. I gave her my hand to hold for a long time, sharing thoughts that would comfort her, while prayerfully affirming that Christ walked ahead of us at every step. After dropping off the lady at her home, I proceeded with that day’s activities. 

That evening I felt sharp muscle pains in my arm. Silently affirming my nature as spiritual, not material, I rejected this testimony of the physical senses as false. I thought about a ray of sunlight, which lights up a precise location without ever being disturbed by what it is illuminating. I immediately thought that during the afternoon my goal had been to let the Christ light, which illuminates a darkened sense, shine through me, and that my health couldn’t be disturbed by doing so.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “God never punishes man for doing right, for honest labor, or for deeds of kindness, though they expose him to fatigue, cold, heat, contagion. If man seems to incur the penalty through matter, this is but a belief of mortal mind, not an enactment of wisdom, and man has only to enter his protest against this belief in order to annul it” (p. 384).