When my husband and I received the call that our daughter had gone into labor with her second child, we headed to the hospital to care for our oldest grandchild (then not quite two). Sitting in the waiting room, I began to feel unwell and wasn’t sure if I could fulfill my upcoming duties. When our son-in-law said it would be a little while before we’d be needed, I went to sit in the car to pray, while my husband bought us some dinner.

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, the textbook on Christian Science, helps readers gain a clearer understanding of God’s unchanging love for all and of our relationship to God—an understanding that brings healing. Anyone can turn to this book along with the Bible, pray with its inspiration, and readily demonstrate the Science contained in its pages. I love this book so much that as soon as I finish reading it through, I start at the beginning again. In addition to reading Science and Health cover to cover on a regular basis, I often find needed inspiration by opening it at random.

So, as I waited in the car, I let the book fall open and saw a passage that I had read many times before but that now held fresh meaning for me: “Hold perpetually this thought,—that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being” (p. 496). Divine Principle and Love are two names for God. I began considering that the Christ—the divine Truth that empowered Jesus’ healing works—is present here and now, just as it was two thousand years ago. Christ enables us to prove that God’s healing goodness is always operating, always active, always right at hand. God is Spirit, supreme good, and we are His spiritual offspring, always under His tender care. Yielding to this truth dissolves whatever seems to be opposed to it.