Healed after headfirst fall

I am very grateful  for both “the prophylactic and therapeutic (that is, the preventive and curative) arts” that “belong emphatically to Christian Science,” as Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 369).

I attribute my freedom from various claims of deterioration that mortal mind would impose on seniors to the preventive power of expecting daily goodness. I cherish this aspect of prayer in Christian Science and regard freedom and protection of our immunity and innocence as our natural right.

I am equally grateful for the curative effects of quick healing of acute challenges that we suddenly face.

Some months ago I stumbled coming downstairs and fell hard face-first onto the floor. I was stunned for a moment, but not worried, because I have fallen a number of times with no damage done. I’ve just always stood up like a child and continued with what I was doing. This time, too, I affirmed the familiar assurance in Science and Health, “Every function of the real man is governed by the divine Mind” (p. 151). I got up, and as I expected, everything operated normally.

A few days later, however, there seemed to be internal dislocation in my chest. I experienced sharp pain and could not move freely. I asked a Christian Science practitioner to help me sustain my immunity from physical ailments, and the sharp pain lifted the first day. As an ache persisted, I asked her to continue her support in the next few days as well. The treatment was fresh and new and comforting every day for both of us.

Among other things, I asked myself what I was looking for as evidence of healing. I knew it wasn’t a physical change, since the whole basis of our prayers was the continuity of good, with “no lapse from nor return to harmony” in my reflection of God, but only “the divine order or spiritual law, in which God and all that He creates are perfect and eternal, to have remained unchanged in its eternal history” (Science and Health, p. 471). I also found myself singing a phrase from the Christian Science Hymnal: “Living stones we, each in his place, / May we be worthy such a grace” (based on the Danish of Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig, Hymn 176), and thought, Well, living stones never could be moved out of place.

And I thought of Mrs. Eddy’s definition of “the proof of healing” as “a sweet and certain sense that God is Love” (Science and Health, p. 569). I really felt that sweet and certain sense of the presence of Love with me. For the first time, I think, I grasped something of what others have described as sensing that a healing has taken place even before the physical evidence fully attests this.

There was no abrupt tangible adjustment in my body. But on the fourth day I told the practitioner I felt I could continue on my own, and did so, in the sheer joy of drinking in the truth about myself as a daughter of my Father-Mother God, without checking on the state of my body.

Besides that, this was the week of my annual Christian Science students’ association meeting, and I knew I would feel the full support of that spiritual renewal. Afterward, bit by bit I noticed that I could carry a half-full carton of things, then that I could lie down in bed without flinching and having to search for a comfortable position, then that I could move a fairly heavy garden stone normally. The healing was complete.

I am very grateful for this and for all of the many healings I have had and what I have learned from them about my and mankind’s inseparability from God—from Love, Truth, and Life.

Elizabeth Pond
Princeton, New Jersey, US