For at least a decade I had an ugly eruption on my arm that would come and go but never completely heal. But because the condition was not painful and didn’t seem threatening, I put off dealing with it through prayer. 

Then one summer day when I was wearing a short-sleeved top, a coworker said, “Susan, look at your arm!” I looked and saw that it was bleeding heavily. Shaken, but finally motivated, I went home and immediately picked up my copy of the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. As I opened the book at random, my eye fell on the first page of the chapter titled “Footsteps of Truth.” I’d read this page countless times, but now I was ready to fully accept what it was telling me. 

This idea particularly stood out to me: “Let us disrobe error. Then, when the winds of God blow, we shall not hug our tatters close about us” (p. 201). As I read that, the mental picture of the condition just dropped from my thought as though I were discarding a dirty shirt. With one reading of those words, the eruption was blotted out of my consciousness and immediately started to dry up and fade away. What had seemed like a solid fixture on my body for over ten years vanished almost overnight.