When World War II ended, I was accepted into a new officers' training program in the United States Navy and assigned to a major East Coast university. I was extremely happy about this, as I'd always been interested in the sea and would not otherwise have had the finances available for a college education.

In the spring of my sophomore year, following an annual physical examination, I was told to report to the naval district headquarters. As I waited, I was asked if I knew why I was there and said "No." "You've failed your physical examination" was the response—which was a total surprise to me, since nothing had been said to me at the time of the exam itself.

I was soon ushered into an examination room, where two Navy doctors checked me over and discussed my condition. They said there was something wrong with my heart and that they had confirmed the earlier findings. I was asked to return the following week for another examination.

I contacted my parents and a Christian Science practitioner who had been my Sunday School teacher before I went to college. She began to pray for me. I spoke to her several times, and she calmed my fears both about my health and about the potential loss of my college education. She placed special emphasis on the truth that man images God's perfect, harmonious being. I clung to the spiritual idea that man is perfect because God is perfect. Mary Baker Eddy states in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "Man is the expression of God's being" and "God's being is infinity, freedom, harmony, and boundless bliss." My expressing of God had to be harmonious.

On the day of the next exam, the practitioner confidently told me not to be afraid—that the doctors were looking for the truth, and that's just what they would find. And what they found was no trace of a heart problem. There was much discussion; I was told to report to a naval hospital for additional testing. After batteries of tests over the next couple of days, all of which proved negative, I was told to return to my unit and to continue the college program. Needless to say, I was extremely grateful.

When I reported for my junior year physical examination, the senior doctor was surprised to find a very fat medical file containing the results of all of the previous tests and including charts, tapes, and so forth. He asked me a few questions and then quietly and carefully read through the entire file, checking back and forth as I waited. He then examined me thoroughly. After some reflection, he looked at me and said, "Son, I don't think any of this ever happened." He took everything from my medical record pertaining to the heart problem and threw it in the wastebasket. I was surprised, but very grateful for this development, as my subsequent years in the Navy would not include periodic review of volumes of information about a problem that "never happened" to God's man.

Through the years Christian Science has been an ever-available, ever-dependable guide to the truth about my family and me when we have encountered other problems, large and small.

Robert Condit Jagel
Gloucester, Massachusetts

I first met Mr. Jagel about five years after his healing. At that time he and I both had to pass rigorous physical exams in order to enter the Navy's submarine school. Had there been the slightest indication of a physical problem of the nature he describes as the original finding of the doctors, he would not have been accepted for submarine training. The healing was clearly complete and permanent.

Carl Brettschneider
Alexandria, Virginia