My husband and I, both musicians, were traveling to where he and his band were playing one night, a significant distance from our home. At a rest stop, as I hurried out of the car, I accidentally slammed the car door on my thumb. My first thought was that I am made by God, who is Spirit, and that as His creation, I am spiritual and therefore can’t be injured or hurt.  

After freeing my thumb from the door, I sat on a bench at the rest area and called a Christian Science practitioner as my husband tried to stop the bleeding. I was scheduled to play the piano the next day at a wedding, but my thumb was badly swollen, and I couldn’t move it. However, I have learned from my study of Christian Science that physical circumstances are not the reality. The spiritual—that which is created and governed by God—is the only reality, and it was necessary for me to keep my thought on the truth, on what God knows about me. Fear wouldn’t bring healing or help me see what was real about me. I refused to ask, “What if?” and instead asked, “Who is God?” and “What is my nature as God’s child?” 

I reasoned that since God is perfect, eternal, and changeless, my perfection as God’s creation also has to be continuous and changeless. As the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, puts it, “The relations of God and man, divine Principle and idea, are indestructible in Science; and Science knows no lapse from nor return to harmony, but holds the divine order or spiritual law, in which God and all that He creates are perfect and eternal, to have remained unchanged in its eternal history” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 470–471).