Steep steps, high heels—and healing

Last year, as I was hurrying down a steep staircase—in high heels—at church, I lost my footing, plunged to the landing, and hit the plaster wall, making a very large dent. My left shoulder and arm were pinned under me and the pain in my head was fearsome. Several ushers, including my husband, rushed to assist me.

I’ve been a Christian Scientist for over six decades and my family and I have had many wonderful healings. So I was absolutely convinced that my best option was to turn to my Father-Mother God in this challenge. Through my study of Christian Science, I’ve learned that we all live under God’s law, which is consistently good, and that spiritual healing is always available.

My head, neck, and shoulder were very painful, but I was able to move to a sitting position with the ushers’ help. I stayed there quietly and prayed. I repeated quietly to myself any statement I could remember from the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.

I relied on the truth that God’s man is held in His love forever. Spiritual man—a generic term for all men, women, and children—can never fall out of God’s care. I knew that when I understood and accepted this fact, any evidence to the contrary would disappear. Based on past experience, I knew these ideas would quiet my considerable fear, comfort me, dispel the pain, and heal any injuries.

One immediate result was that I was able to walk into the church auditorium to listen to the Lesson-Sermon being read. The Lesson is made up of selections from the Bible and Science and Health. As God’s good providence would have it, that week’s Lesson was entitled “God, the Preserver of Man.”

Again and again, I turned my thought away from fear of injury and bodily conditions to the spiritual message in the service. It was telling me that God does not inflict suffering on His children, that accidents are unknown to God, and that man cannot be harmed while doing good. It also stated that pain cannot take our joy away from us; we can prove that evil has no power over our lives when its suggestions are opposed promptly and persistently. I listened very carefully, and drank in these ideas like a dry plant drinks in water.

Later, when I returned home with my husband, I looked up everything I could find about accidents in the Bible and Science and Health. Mrs. Eddy wrote, “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. 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.”

I spent the next few days reversing the process—disbelieving physics, turning away from what so-called material laws would say about this incident and its effects, and being faithful to metaphysics, the fundamental and spiritual nature of reality. I prayed with these inspired ideas. For instance, God’s man is not on a collision course with anyone or anything. There can be no effect from any other cause than God, good, who is the “great and only cause.” This is the spiritually scientific basis for the fact that accidents are unreal. And under this law, evil cannot linger in man—that’s men, women, and children as they are known by God—because it never touched man in the first place.

I also knew that no one can be harmed while doing good. I was at church to serve God, and I couldn’t suffer any ill effects because of that. All these statements, and others which I held to, are laws of God. And when they come to us as we pray, we can think of them as the angels of His presence to which the 91st Psalm refers when it says, “…he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.” I was comforted and sustained by these angel messages.

While I did not count the days, within two weeks of this type of prayer, I was able to turn my head normally, move my arm and shoulder freely, and awaken without pain. I was completely healed in every detail. (And my husband patched and painted the wall at church!)

Reverse the process:

Science and Health
397:12-22

King James Bible
Ps 91:11