I used to struggle a lot with my relationship to God.

I’d had healings before, but I felt like that was mostly because my parents had prayed, or I’d had the help of a Christian Science practitioner—someone you can contact to pray for you. I didn’t feel close to God or like I could turn to God for help on my own.

In the sixth and seventh grades, it wasn’t just my relationship to God, but with Christian Science in general. I felt distanced from the ideas I’d grown up with. I was bored of hearing the same Bible stories in Christian Science Sunday School, and I was upset when I couldn’t host or go to a sleepover on Saturday night because I had to go to church the next morning. 

I didn’t feel close to God or like I could turn to God for help on my own.

Near the end of seventh grade, I started feeling a small pain in the side of my back. One day in class it worsened to the point that I was struggling to walk. I didn’t want to go home, so I asked my teacher if I could go to my school’s wellness center. 

The wellness center was a dark and empty room with a service dog that was wet from playing in the grass. I was having an extremely hard time praying in that environment. After a few minutes, I went to the nurse’s office and asked to call my dad. As I waited for him to come get me, I lay on the cot. 

As I was lying there, a boy in my grade came in. He had a brace on his left wrist and was telling the nurse that he’d fallen and now his right wrist was hurt too. The nurse tended to him, then called his mom and left the room.

I asked him what had happened. He explained that he had recently broken his left wrist while snowboarding and had fallen on his right wrist that morning while playing field hockey during gym class. Eventually, his mom came to pick him up, and then my dad arrived to take me home. In the car, my dad called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me.

When I got home, I climbed into my parents’ big, comfortable bed. The pain in my back was intense. It was my dad’s idea to read from the book Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer. This book is a biography of the Founder of Christian Science. We read the chapter called “Advice for Healers,” and it was comforting to hear how she sternly, but lovingly, taught people how to become better healers. 

In one letter, Mrs. Eddy talked about the need to “strike for the higher sense of the nothingness of matter” (Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, Amplified Edition, p. 226). To me, this meant that since God, whom the Bible says is Spirit and completely good, is our creator, then nothing bad can be part of me, since I am God’s reflection. Understanding the nothingness of this pain was helping me to know God’s goodness better.  

I also thought about the boy in the nurse’s office. I prayed to know that everyone is spiritual and expresses God. I knew that if I was capable of having a healing, then so was he, because he is also a child of God.

The sharp pain in my back eased, and I was able to find a comfortable position and go to sleep while listening to some of my favorite hymns from the Christian Science Hymnal. When I woke up, the pain was completely gone. I was even able to attend Cotillion (a formal dance lesson at my school) the next night.

When I got to the school gym the next evening and the dance teachers lined us up to be partnered, I saw the boy from the nurse’s office with no brace on either of his wrists. It was amazing to see that he also seemed better.

To me, this whole experience was much bigger than just the pain in my back going away. I am so grateful for this healing because it solidified my relationship to God and makes me think of Jesus’ words about healing, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also” (John 14:12).

Now, when people ask why I believe in God, this healing is what I share. It’s really strengthened my connection to God and Christian Science and has proved God’s loving presence and power to me.