One day when I was a young adult, I discovered a bump at the palm joint end of one of my finger bones. It was painful to grip a steering wheel. I recalled that a few years before this, a soccer teammate had had a calcium deposit surgically removed from a toe joint, and I thought that this could be a similar issue. At first, it scared me a little, and I wasn’t sure how to begin praying about it. But I had grown up attending Christian Science Sunday School and had full confidence in the practicality of applying spiritual truths to any problem.

One Sunday, taking my seat in a local branch Church of Christ, Scientist, with my hand hurting, I unthinkingly rubbed the area. A statement from the Christian Science textbook came powerfully to mind: “. . . let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error . . .” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 242). I knew right then that whatever this was could be dissolved through prayer. And I certainly liked the idea of it being dissolved by the universal solvent of Love—God!

At home, I looked up the entire quote. It reads, “In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error,—self-will, self-justification, and self-love,—which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death.”