Recently, during a Wednesday testimony meeting in the branch Church of Christ, Scientist, where I am a member, someone gave a testimony I could identify with. She spoke of her recovery from an apparent stroke and the challenges she had faced because of immobility. I was startled because her brief description brought to mind a most beautiful healing I had several years ago of a similar condition, and I hoped I had been duly grateful.

This prompted me to think over past blessings, and as I went through the years, from child raising to retirement, I remembered one healing after another. I began to realize that the most challenging had brought the greatest rewards and spiritual progress.

The circumstances that first brought us to Christian Science occurred when our eldest daughter was suffering from polio. The doctors pronounced her incurable. She was seventeen years old then, and we were told that she should spend the remainder of her life in a back brace to keep her spine from curving. I told the doctors we were considering Christian Science treatment. They said that if we could give her comfort and peace of mind, it would be a good thing to do, but they said nothing could restore her full health. The last remark as we left to seek help in Christian Science was lovingly and somewhat apologetically stated: "I am sorry, but we must register your daughter as incurable on the records of the city." With the help of a Christian Science practitioner our daughter was completely healed, and we all started attending the local branch church. Incidentally, this same daughter has four grown children of her own now. She plays a good game of tennis regularly, with no handicaps, and is an ardent Christian Scientist.

In spite of my gratitude for this dramatic healing and my desire to become a church member, I could not stop smoking. Many times I tried but with no success. Attempts to quit only made me irritable. A practitioner cautioned me to allow my understanding of God to grow, and to replace this false dependency naturally—not to use willpower. Many years later, after my healing of the effects of a stroke, I was eager to finally become a member of this healing movement. One call to a practitioner was all that was necessary. My freedom was complete. I have never smoked since, which has left me free to reap the benefits of membership in The Mother Church and a branch church.

At one time our son, who yearned to play football, was told by the examining doctor for his school team that he could not play because he had a heart murmur. He came home terrified and in tears. We called a practitioner to pray for the boy and then made an appointment with a local doctor to clear the boy to play football. After a thorough physical in which the doctor seemed to pay an undue amount of attention to the heartbeat, listening again and again, he asked our son to run down three flights of stairs and back up as fast as he could. Then he again listened to his heart. Our son was wreathed in smiles when the doctor said, "In all of my practice, I have never heard a stronger heart." This young man played football throughout high school and college, and today he still has remarkable endurance.

My younger daughter and her husband have not had any church affiliation for a long time. But recently when this son-in-law was dangerously near death because of gunshot wounds, my daughter came to me for help and comfort through Christian Science.

I called my Christian Science teacher to pray for me in this situation. I prayed for my daughter. My son-in-law was under the care of the hospital staff and had not asked for Christian Science treatment himself, so I was careful not to overstep the ethical bounds of Christian scientific practice—I did not pray for him specifically. But the light of the Christ so uplifted the mental atmosphere surrounding him that the darkness of death and fear could not remain, and he responded to this change. The verdicts of the surgeons were dramatically reversed, one by one, and my daughter's repeated communication to me over a period of hours acknowledged this beautiful progress and attributed it to the power of prayer.

After her husband had been assaulted he was taken to a local hospital by the police. Two bullets had passed through his body; one had entered the shoulder and the other had punctured his lung. A third bullet was lodged in his wrist. The wrist was shattered and the lung deflated. The surgeon had decided to amputate the arm, but he soon reversed his decision.

My son-in-law reports that he never suffered pain. He refused all medication when he regained consciousness, and within a short period of time he was out of the hospital. His wounds healed so quickly that the therapy the surgeon had expected would be necessary, if he ever wanted to use his hand again, wasn't needed. He was free!

My complete freedom from grief at the passing of my husband was a great help to our family, who appreciated my efforts to see their much-loved dad in his true likeness to God as an immortal idea. This spiritual awareness comforted them.

Now I am grateful to be an active member of a thriving branch church and love to serve in every way I can. I shall never be able to express enough love for Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science and worked to fulfill this purpose, which she gives in the Manual of The Mother Church (p. 17): "To organize a church designed to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing."

ALICE D. LAMB
Cincinnati, Ohio