Turning to prayer first

Emily Holden

Originally appeared online in the teen series: Your Healings - June 19, 2018

I was sitting in my room at school, trying to finish a piece of homework, when suddenly my stomach started to hurt. At first I didn’t really know what to do. Then I tried changing my position to make it feel better, but nothing was working.

I had seen Christian Science healings before in my family, so I knew that healing through prayer was possible. One time my horse became really unwell, and the vets thought that he should be put down. But after my grandma prayed for him, he improved really quickly and was back to normal in a month. But even though I’d seen this great healing, I had never prayed for myself before.

In the Christian Science Sunday School I had learned many ways I could pray about difficult situations, but I found it hard to consciously think about prayer or how to pray when a problem arose. So in the past, I’d tended to look for physical help rather than spiritual.

However, in Sunday School the week before this, I had been thinking about how I wanted to turn to prayer more and make prayer a bigger part of my life. I’d seen the huge benefits it had brought to other people’s lives. Also, I’d recently been to a couple of camps for Christian Scientists in the UK. I was feeling inspired and very uplifted by the discussion groups about prayer and the conversations I’d had with other Christian Scientists. Other people had shared that they didn’t always find it easy to think of prayer as the first solution either, so I’d realized that I wasn’t alone. But this also left me with a desire to keep turning to prayer in my own life, and to think of it more as my “go-to” when I was dealing with something difficult.

This amazing healing gave me a deeper trust in God and showed me that I have the ability to turn to prayer first.

So when my stomach was still hurting after a few minutes, I made the conscious decision to pray. I started to think about how God is Spirit, so He couldn’t have a stomachache. And since God isn’t affected by pain, then I couldn’t be either, because I am His perfect reflection and expression. Likewise, God is all-power, and His power is good and is always governing me. So nothing bad could suddenly take over or even touch me.

Because I was thinking about God, I stopped thinking about the pain, and I started to feel calmer. I no longer felt like the stress and discomfort had power over me. My prayers brought such a calmness and stillness that I stopped fixating on my physical state. Around ten minutes later, I realized that the stomachache was completely gone.

This amazing first healing gave me a deeper trust in God and showed me that I have the ability to turn to prayer first. I can’t wait to see more of what Christian Science can do in my life.

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