Testimony of Healing March 24, 2014 Issue

Injured foot healed

Mark Swinney

Lessons learned while praying are my most valuable ones, and I’d like to tell of a treasured lesson from which I hope others may benefit. One of my dear friends is a horse—a leopard Appaloosa. Her coat is white with brownish black spots, and she is quite tall. You never met a gentler, braver horse. At all times, she is very considerate and well-mannered. Not long ago, we were in a barn and she inadvertently walked on my foot. She heard me cry out loudly right by her ear but surprisingly wasn’t startled by the unexpected noise.

Immediately, I forgave her. She always has been respectful of my space, and this was completely unintentional. It may sound like I was calm and composed, but I was feeling anything but tranquility. The pain was so intense that I really couldn’t think straight—or at least I thought I couldn’t. But a point Mary Baker Eddy makes in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures knocked on my mental door: “When an accident happens, you think or exclaim, ‘I am hurt!’ Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real” (p. 397).

I realized immediately that I was working with my thought rather than a physical foot and hoof. A couple of minutes later, using the Web browser on my phone, I looked up what follows that quote in Science and Health, and it gave me specific direction on how to pray next: “Now reverse the process. Declare that you are not hurt and understand the reason why, and you will find the ensuing good effects to be in exact proportion to your disbelief in physics, and your fidelity to divine metaphysics, confidence in God as All, which the Scriptures declare Him to be.”

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