I am new to the sport of pickleball and have been playing it a lot recently. After playing one day last summer, I felt pain in my lower back. I rested for two days, thinking the pain would go away. When it didn’t, I took additional time off from the sport, but the pain became more acute. During this time, I had a beautiful healing of tooth pain, so I was inspired to pray about the back issue as well. I requested metaphysical treatment from a Christian Science practitioner, and although there was some improvement, I was still unable to play pickleball without pain. 

After a couple of weeks, one day I took time in the middle of the day to reread that week’s Bible Lesson (found in the Christian Science Quarterly). The subject was “Mind,” and the gist of the Lesson, as I understood it, was that God is continually sending us His thoughts, which are wholly good. The Bible says, “I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11). I prayed for several minutes, listening for how this applied to me. 

Around that time, I received a text message that appeared to be from a friend who is a saved contact on my phone. However, something didn’t seem quite right about the sender information, including the phone number. Suspicious, I sent a message to my friend to ask if he had texted me from a different number. He immediately responded that he had not. I deleted the original message, and as I did so, my phone prompted, “Delete and report junk?”—which I did.