How Christian Science changed my life
During my high school years, I was not interested in learning, and I didn’t think or care about my future. I was just having a good time with friends and practicing my sports. But after I graduated from high school, I found myself thinking, “Now what?”
About a week after graduation, for no particular reason that I can remember, I started reading Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. I had heard a little bit about Christian Science, and my father owned a copy of Science and Health, so I decided to read it.
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After reading the first chapter, which is about prayer, I got the idea to study chemical engineering at the university in my city of Arequipa in Peru. To get into this program, I had to take an exam, and the acceptance rate was very low. Because I hadn’t been a good student in school, my chances of being admitted were not high. And since I hadn’t learned much during my school years, now I had to learn topics in three months that normally took five years of high school to master.
I had to learn topics in three months that normally took five years of high school to master.
Suddenly, there I was studying math, physics, and chemistry from textbooks that I had never opened before. I read and did practice exercises from those books for about sixteen hours a day. My studying was so focused that I stopped only to eat and sleep, and my only other activity was continuing to read Science and Health. The book is filled with spiritual ideas that were giving me a different view of myself—a better one. Every page I read was full of treasures, and I didn’t want to give that up. I wanted to know more about God, about myself, about life, and about spiritual perfection. For the first time, I felt I wasn’t alone.
My parents were shocked by my sudden commitment to all this learning, but they did not try to change my mind to studying something more practical for me. And after those three months of preparing for the exam, I was admitted to the university for chemical engineering.
Throughout this time, the first line of Science and Health stuck with me: “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings” (p. vii). This taught me that leaning on God means that anything good and right is possible, and I was able to prove this by mastering so much material in what seemed like an impossibly short time.
Leaning on God means that anything good and right is possible, and I was able to prove it.
The success of my preparation for the university exam and all of my university years was the result of gaining a better understanding of God as Mind, as intelligence itself. I trusted divine Mind when I studied and when I took exams. I also helped my classmates understand the subjects. The more I gave to others in this way, the more I felt blessed.
Christian Science has changed my life for good. I joined a local Christian Science society and became a member of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts. I had experiences throughout my university years when studying Christian Science helped me in very specific ways.
This experience taught me that intelligence is not in our brain. It is a quality of God that we all reflect as His children. I also learned that when we lean on God, there’s nothing that can hold us back.