About a year ago severe pain and restricted motion began to develop in both my shoulders. This condition progressed to where I was having trouble performing basic tasks, such as reaching for items on a shelf, dressing myself, and driving. Though I was praying to see myself as completely spiritual and exempt from any material conditions, including pain, I discovered that I was also attempting to find a physical cause for my distress, which might then suggest a physical solution. Could it be an aftereffect of a recent Covid experience, the result of a childhood injury, a supposedly hereditary joint ailment? Needless to say, this sort of thinking led me nowhere good. Yet, I found it nearly impossible to break free from this thought pattern.

A few days later, with some persistence, I was able to shift the focus of my prayers away from trying to fix the pain and restricted mobility to addressing the way I was thinking. I started to affirm the sourceless nature of any sickness or injury, and the ever-present, all-powerful, all-good, and loving nature of God, the one true source. I saw that disease or disharmony of any sort can have no origin, no creator. My study of Christian Science has taught me that God and His all-good spiritual manifestation—each one of us—are the only entities that are real or true. 

As I prayed, the idea that kept coming to me was the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). It dawned on me that my dogged determination to discover a physical cause for my problem was, essentially, just a temptation to worship another god. Doing so was attributing authority to something that, in reality, is untrue and thus powerless. This statement from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy was most helpful: “The material body manifests only what mortal mind believes, whether it be a broken bone, disease, or sin” (p. 402).