Pain isn’t normal
I used to struggle with monthly menstrual cramps. To be honest, the pain seemed normal to me. My friends dealt with the same issue, and the mentality was that there was nothing we could do about it, except maybe take medicine to temporarily relieve the pain.
Once, when I was traveling from my home in Rio de Janeiro to see my grandparents in another state in Brazil, the pain became so severe that I began to feel like I might faint. But I had been attending the Christian Science Sunday School, where I’d learned that God is always loving me and taking care of me. In that moment, I was able to pray with this healing idea, and within an hour the pain went away. I knew, though, that I wanted a permanent healing, and so I began to think more about some of the things I had learned in Sunday School.
For a long time, I was mystified by the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible. They were thrown out of paradise, and were cursed to struggle and experience pain, because of one mistake. It didn’t make sense to me that God, being all power and all good, could create something capable of doing something so wrong—like a man and a woman who would be disobedient. And if somehow He did create something that turned out to be a mistake, why not just fix it, instead of punishing it for the rest of eternity? Since God is all power, He certainly could have done that.
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