‘Christian Science had a better answer’

While volunteering at a local food bank, I moved a really heavy box of cucumbers for my coworkers. At home that night, it hurt to breathe. 

I thought the pain would probably go away by morning, but I tossed and turned all night and couldn’t sleep because of the pain.  

When after a few days I still didn’t feel any better, my mom scheduled a doctor’s appointment for two days later, since my family is used to going to doctors. It still hadn’t hit me that I could use what I’d been learning about Christian Science to pray about and heal this issue. 

The doctor explained that I’d sprained my rib cage and would be in pain for three to four weeks while the injury healed—and that the only help she could suggest was to take a painkiller.

At that point, it was clear to me that Christian Science had a better answer. 

I’d been reading the textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and meeting with a Christian Scientist once a week to help me understand what I’d read. The week I sprained my rib cage, I was reading the chapter “Science, Theology, Medicine,” and two passages stood out to me as a helpful way of thinking more spiritually about what had happened. The first was, “The seasons will come and go with changes of time and tide, cold and heat, latitude and longitude. The agriculturist will find that these changes cannot affect his crops” (p. 125). This passage reminded me that when I understand myself as spiritual, and God’s universe as spiritual, too, then cold, heat, sickness, and sin can’t touch or hurt me. Because my identity is spiritual, not material, nothing can change me—not even lifting a box that is “too heavy” for me. 

Christian Science was helping me rule out the bad thoughts and giving me good ones.

The other passage that helped me was this one: “Christian Science brings to the body the sunlight of Truth, which invigorates and purifies. Christian Science acts as an alterative, neutralizing error with Truth” (p. 162). I thought it was so cool that Christian Science was working for me, helping me rule out the bad thoughts and giving me good ones. I thought of it like having my personal “hype man” who tells me, “You can do it!” and, “You’re OK!”

When I talked to my Christian Science friend a few days later, I explained what had happened and what the doctor had said. I also told her how I’d been praying and said I was feeling much better. Over the next week, I continued praying with these ideas, and before I knew it, I wasn’t in any pain at all and could move normally again. This healing took a lot less time than the doctor had predicted, and I know that’s because of God.