As I was eating dinner one evening, I felt some sensitivity in a tooth. My assumption, based on experience, was that there was something wrong that needed the attention of a dentist. 

Suddenly I felt the power of Christian Science wash over me like a spiritual tsunami, and it short-circuited that materialistic thinking. I contemplated the three decades I’d been studying and practicing Christian Science, including the consecrated praying I had been doing for the past month about a challenging international situation that was being reported in the news. I found an idea from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which appears in a paragraph next to the marginal heading “Only one standard,” to be particularly powerful. Mary Baker Eddy writes: “God could never impart an element of evil, and man possesses nothing which he has not derived from God” (p. 539).

In that moment I saw that the metaphysical understanding I’d been applying to the larger issue could also be directed toward protesting the sensation in my mouth. Christian Science teaches that healing doesn’t come through accepting physical ills as real and then attempting to make sick matter well. Instead, we declare and claim our true identity as both 100 percent spiritual—made in the image and likeness of God, Spirit—and 100 percent well right here and now.