Can Christian Science help in a crisis?
“What do I do?”
This was the question running at top speed through my mind. My boyfriend had just stopped by to pick me up, and there was something wrong with his arm.
It was summer, and we were both working at camps located on a mountain a couple of hours from our respective homes. When I asked him what happened, he told me he had been bitten by a rat while getting goat chow to feed animals in the petting zoo at his camp.
We’d learned how to pray about problems in school or with friends. But this seemed really serious.
We both attended Christian Science Sunday School and had learned how to pray about problems in school or with friends. But this seemed really serious. We didn’t know what to do. Or did we?
Well, we had learned that God loves His creation—us—and that we could pray to God for help. We realized that we could do that much. We could ask God for help.
There was no other help available. So we got in the car, and as we drove down the mountain, we prayed. We asked God to guide us and show us what to do. We turned wholeheartedly to God and did our best to put all our trust in Him.
At one point, we stopped and called a Christian Science practitioner to support our prayers with her own. Since no one was home at either of our houses, we decided to spend the entire day under an umbrella at the beach reading the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. We looked for anything that had to do with love. We prayed to hold nothing against the rat, or even the goats! We knew that divine Love is an antidote for anything negative or destructive.
In Science and Health, we found the statement, “The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in truth through flood-tides of Love” (p. 201). We began doing just that. We filled our thoughts with nothing but Love—God—so there was no room for fear or resentment. We prayed to see evidence of divine Love all around us: Every person on the beach and every car we passed we looked at through eyes of love until we were totally saturated—no place at all in our thinking for anything but Love.
Under the umbrella, my friend fell asleep, but I continued reading to see and feel God’s healing love. I read until I was convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing dangerous or harmful could ever exist or take place in Love’s universe. I felt peace. I dearly loved my friend and felt safe knowing that he was in God’s care. Eventually, we packed up our stuff, and as we drove home, we watched the angry red streaks on his arm simply fade away. By the time we got home, there was no evidence that anything had ever been wrong.
We were grateful to have been part of this healing—so much so that we even worked together to write down this experience. But best of all was the realization that even though we were still in Sunday School, we could hear God and did know what to do: We prayed!
