Christian Science came to our family when my grandmother called a practitioner to pray for her child, after a serious automobile accident. Physicians had given her no hope for the child's recovery; indeed they predicted mental retardation if she did live. Healed she was, through Christian Science treatment, and she had no remaining effects of the injuries.

Although my grandmother did not become a Christian Scientist at that time, she did credit the remarkable recovery to prayer and the spiritual understanding of the practitioner. That child, my mother, eventually did become a Christian Scientist. She has always been an inspiration to me.

Although I attended Sunday School, I gave up my study of Christian Science after marriage. My husband was active in a mainline Christian denomination, and convinced me that our family should attend his church.

When our three children were under six, my husband suddenly passed on. We were thousands of miles from family, and at first I was grief-stricken and overwhelmed. But with the support of my mother's prayers in particular, every need was met. A booklet, "God's Law of Adjustment," was my reintroduction to the religion, and gradually I began reading the Bible and Science and Health. A practitioner, who had once been my Sunday School teacher, faithfully helped me by praying for us.

As I grew in spiritual understanding, my life became renewed. I was able to find housing, met and married a fine man, and was blessed with the continuing support of family.

Recently I had an experience of physical protection, at work on our farm. I was preparing an order of apples for market. These apples are kept in twenty-bushel boxes, in cold storage; a hydraulic forklift is used to move the boxes.

Since my last visit to storeroom, some boxes had been moved, and the tines of the lift were protruding between them. I did not see the tines, and caught my foot on one as I walked past, falling backward, heavily, onto the concrete floor. Immediately I declared what I had learned: that I was a spiritual idea, and could not be hurt. I tried to focus my thought on the statement from page 397 of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures—"When an accident happens, you think or exclaim, 'I am hurt!' Your thought is more powerful than your words, more powerful than the accident itself, to make the injury real.

"Now reverse the process. Declare that you are not hurt and understand the reason why, and you will find the ensuing good effects to be in exact proportion to your disbelief in physics, and your fidelity to divine metaphysics, confidence in God as All, which the Scriptures declare Him to be." I got up, and for several minutes continued to pray along these lines. I did not suffer any ill effects from the fall.

I have been deeply blessed by the support of practitioners and other Christian Scientists over the years. The truth is indeed always present to help, in any situation.

Dana A. Nesbitt
Albion, New York