One of my favorite activities is playing volleyball. I played on my high-school team and spent most of my free time playing as much as I could. My high school was very competitive in volleyball, and our practices were intense. During one of our exercises, I twisted my knee.

Immediately, my coach and the athletic trainer carried me into an another room outside of the gym and asked many questions about my leg. I answered them, but the only thing I could really think of was "God is All, God is All." It was such a strong thought that I almost found myself saying it out loud. It was actually my prayer: I kept on praying that way until I calmed down. My coach and the trainer predicted a recovery period of several months before I could play again.

Meanwhile, someone had called my mom to tell her what had happened, and she came to the gym, helped me into the car, and took me home. When I got there, I called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me for healing. I remember her telling me that all was well.

At first I struggled with what she had said, because, at that moment, I wasn't exactly certain that all was well. But I continued my prayer of affirmation that God was All, which had come to me in the gym. Then I realized that because of that fact—that there is only one reality, which is God—every aspect of my body had to correspond with God's government, and that meant my knee had to be OK.

Within a couple of days, I was back at school, but I wasn't able to walk very well yet. As the week progressed, I kept thinking about something I had read in Science and Health: "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" (p. 397).

During that week, I was assigned to read a short story for my creative writing class. As I read through it, I came upon an instance where the main character was cleaning a second-story window of his house and fell out of it to the ground and twisted his knee. I let out a yelp at what I had just read. But then I laughed. I was reading a fictional story—nothing had happened in real life.

All of a sudden, I realized that nothing had happened to change the perfect way God had made me, either. This had to be true. At practice I had been thinking about God's power as being all-power. His law of good had to supersede any injury or the bad effects of any experience based on material laws of pain or injury. As I kept reasoning this way, I began to put more of my trust in God's care for me. Since I knew there is only one God, then there could be only one power or law that was governing me, my experiences, and even my body.

After thinking about that for a few minutes, I began to, as that passage says, "understand the reason why" I was not hurt. The pain in my knee became as unreal to me as that fictional, made-up character who fell out of the window in the short story.

I felt a conviction that the healing was taking place.

The next week I was back practicing with my volleyball team—earlier than the trainer's predicted recovery time by two months!

This occurred about eight years ago, and my knee continues to be fine.

Susan Bowen
Chelsea, Massachusetts