For five or six years, I suffered from pain in my shoulders and numbness in my legs and feet. It seemed that I had extensive nerve damage in my legs and feet and almost no feeling in my toes. I would wake in the morning and be unable to feel my feet. Despite specific prayer about this problem, the condition remained.

I was an avid scuba diver and had logged over two hundred dives. In my training to become a scuba diver, I had learned that symptoms such as those I was experiencing were associated with a “diving accident”—staying down too long or ascending too quickly. We were told that the effects of such an incident would show up immediately following it. Since I had never had a problem immediately following a dive, I had not thought to specifically deny in my daily prayer for myself that this could be part of my God-given identity.

One morning I awoke to such shoulder and neck pain that I could barely move my head. This grew worse over the next three days. After listening to the weekly Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly in my car on the way to meet friends for lunch, I felt that I should give myself a Christian Science treatment. I felt strongly that this time I needed to recognize and affirm that there had never been a diving accident in the allness of God. After affirming the allness of God, Love, and my unbroken relationship to Him, I thought about the physical laws that diving too deeply, ascending too quickly, and nitrogen gas producing bubbles in the system could be harmful.