While our elder son was away from home on holiday, it felt an appropriate time to have the carpets in his flat cleaned. He had wanted to have them done but had been so busy with his job that he hadn’t had the time to contact a cleaning company. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to surprise him by having the carpets cleaned during his absence, as they would take a day or two to dry. 

While I was at my son’s flat overseeing the job, my phone rang. It was in my handbag on the other side of the room, and to get to it, I had to maneuver my way around the rearranged furniture. As I did so, I caught my foot on the leg of a chair and fell headlong onto the floor.

Immediately, I thought of Mary Baker Eddy’s words: “Let us reassure ourselves with the law of Love. God never punishes man for doing right, for honest labor, or for deeds of kindness, though they expose him to fatigue, cold, heat, contagion.” I added the word accident to this list of penalties. The passage continues, “If man seems to incur the penalty through matter, this is but a belief of mortal mind, not an enactment of wisdom, and man has only to enter his protest against this belief in order to annul it” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 384).