My encounter with Christian Science Primary class instruction came suddenly and spontaneously. I could not possibly have imagined how this unexpected opportunity would alter my life. I like to think that it was evidence of God guiding my journey upward.

I’d scheduled a summer visit with family in another part of the country, accompanied by my 18-month-old toddler. Shortly after arriving, I made an appointment with a longtime friend of our family, a Christian Science practitioner and teacher. Over the years we’d had many wonderful healings with the support of his prayers. While I was in his office, the subject of class instruction came up, and I ended up joining his next class.

I learned so much in that class—no college course could ever compare. My perspective, my aims, and my approach to dealing with life’s challenges were all turned in a different direction. 

On the very first day of class, something stirred in me as never before. I absolutely knew that taking this educational path in the way of Spirit was the most important decision of my life. God was the foremost topic under discussion, and I developed a yearning—a real hunger—to know God at the deepest level and understand more about my relationship to Him. 

Then came the unveiling of error and sin in their myriad forms of guile, enticement, and deception. They were fully exposed in the class teaching. Looking back today, I smile quietly, recalling my attitude at the time. I was married to a super guy, we had a dear little baby, and our life was a lark. Why in the world, I thought, do I need to learn about error and sin?

But I did listen conscientiously to the instruction. I learned the importance of being alert. I learned the value of detecting and destroying erroneous and sinful suggestions that can so easily reroute one’s desire to be on a spiritual path. I learned how to be victorious over evil through increasing my knowledge of the Christ, the healing and saving power of God.

Two years later my husband and I were blessed with a second child, who appeared to develop the symptoms of autism. The “lark” in my life was gone. But it was replaced with something far greater: the desire to demonstrate what I had been learning. Class instruction had furnished me with the spiritual preparation to meet this challenge through the scientific understanding of divine Truth and Love. I plunged into more consecrated study with a courage and faith that would not have been possible before class. The result was that this child was completely healed of every sign of autism.

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, beside the marginal heading “Results of faith in Truth,” Mary Baker Eddy writes about healing, “When we come to have more faith in the truth of being than we have in error, more faith in Spirit than in matter, more faith in living than in dying, more faith in God than in man, then no material suppositions can prevent us from healing the sick and destroying error” (p. 368). Her words are the epitome of what I gained in class instruction.