From birth I suffered from indigestion and constipation

Bernice Mead Spoo

From birth I suffered from indigestion and constipation. These, together with repeated attacks of diphtheria, pneumonia, and tonsillitis, kept me in a depleted condition. When about fourteen years old I started to have continual colds. A little later hay fever developed, then asthma.

Forced to remain indoors while my associates romped outside, I became a rather serious student for one of my age, preferring Confucius and Marcus Aurelius to the light gift books which were showered upon me through sympathy. Although my environment was deeply religious it did not answer the many complex questions that constantly came to my thought. Therefore gradually I became first a cynic, then an agnostic. To improve my health, every known remedy was thoroughly tested: medicine, climate, altitude, diet, baths, osteopathy, and serums. Because of the asthma, it became a common occurrence for me to sit up weeks at a time because I could not breathe lying down.

One evening, feeling particularly restless and desperate, I asked that a Christian Science practitioner be called, much in the spirit of a lark, hoping it might break the awful monotony. Like Naaman, I expected her to come to me. Instead, she offered to give me an absent treatment, which to me was a huge joke. The next day she asked for an interview, during which I told her I had no faith in Christian Science or in anything else. She quietly replied, " 'We never need to despair of an honest heart,' " which I learned later is a quotation from "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 8). I also told her that if in taking treatments I was becoming obligated to join her church, I did not wish to continue. She assured me I should never be urged to join.

That night, to my great surprise, I slept soundly for several hours, during which time I discarded the bolster pillows (which maintained a sitting posture), thus allowing my body to assume a normal sleeping position. From dawn until noon I wrestled between doubt and hope, trying to decide whether or not the sleep was the result of the treatment, or whether it "just happened." Then I telephoned the practitioner that, ridiculous as it still seemed to me, her treatment had had an effect upon my body. In three weeks I was completely and permanently healed of the asthma, the only condition I had mentioned to her. Moreover, I was likewise healed of the indigestion and constipation, neither of which I had mentioned. Since my first treatment it has never occurred to me to use any kind of material remedy.

This was in September, 1913. That autumn was the first one during which I had ever been free from throat troubles. Deciding to make up for lost time, I learned to play tennis, a little later to skate, then later to swim. The following autumn suffered from an attack of tonsillitis, whereupon I asked that a practitioner be called. Through absent treatment a complete healing was effected in three days. Then I called upon the practitioner and told her that at first I wanted only to be healed so that I might enjoy life, but that now I wanted to know all about how healings were accomplished. I have been a student ever since.

Grateful as I am for the health and strength I now enjoy, I am much more thankful for the peace and contentment that have come as a result of knowing something about God. Life no longer seems to me a hodgepodge of chance happenings; but I know that "we must leave the mortal basis of belief and unite with the one Mind, in order to change the notion of chance to the proper sense of God's unerring direction and thus bring out harmony" (Science and Health, p. 424). I also know that "neither philosophy nor skepticism can hinder the march of the Science which reveals the supremacy of Mind" (ibid., p. 209).

I am thankful that when I earnestly desired membership in a branch church and in The Mother Church I was received. Later I was given the priceless privilege of class instruciton. My greatest desire is so to live this beautiful truth that others will be attracted to it and thereby learn to live "more abundantly."

(Mrs.) Bernice Mead Spoo, Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

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