IT WAS PAINFUL TO WATCH (I can only guess what it must have been like to live through) as a longtime friend's life completely fell apart—professionally, financially, socially, physically. The good thing about his story is that through prayer,boatloads of it, he made a rebound. His life was completely restored on all fronts, as you'll see later. I've seen other lives restored through prayer, but none where the individual has fallen so steeply, so far, and for so long.

When I first met Van—that's his unknown middle name, used here as a small gesture to his lifetime preference for privacy—he drove a gleaming sports car, a red Corvette as I recall. He looked the part of a successful Hollywood producer. Actually, his career had been in advertising. He'd had a lucrative run, including heading his own agency. He'd grown up in Europe, spoke half a dozen languages fluently, moved to United states, knew success firsthand. Van was the sharpest dresser I've ever known.

Although you couldn't notice it at first, things were already cracking up for him. The car and clothes? A thin veneer concealing deeper troubles. Over time, dents began going unfixed. Shirts started to fray. Professionally, things went south. Personally, key relationships disintegrated. Nagging health problems—perhaps rooted in a decades-long smoking habit—mushroomed.

Van made poor choices, got beaten up and robbed, couldn't hang on to a job, drank too much, and came perilously close to living on the streets. Friends found it increasingly awkward to know him, and they vanished. It all seemed a bit like watching the Titanic go down in slow motion, with Van's life ending up as a debris field on the ocean floor. There it lay for over ten years. I'd get calls from him, sometimes incoherent, asking for prayer. And while I gave it my best shot, I yearned to see more healing in his heart.

In those darkest days, though, a slim ray of light somehow pierced through to the seabed and touched him. Decades earlier, he'd had solutions through prayer. That prayer hadn't been a begging of God for help so much as it had been some awareness of God's nature, His love and care for all His sons and daughters. This awareness, held to faithfully, had healing power. He started asking himself, Could that power be reclaimed? The book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy assured him, yes, it could.

Van made a resolution. Since the insights in the book gave him so much, he determined to take whatever days he had left and give back. Those two words became a touchstone: Give back. They flowered into a lifesaving commitment.

A theme runs through the Scriptures—and through Science and Health, too—of restoration. God is a restorer. If things are falling apart in someone's life, that doesn't have to continue. For anyone fearing that the good of his or her life is somehow sinking, this is one of the most comforting facts about God. It is His nature to restore. To bring back. To renew. To make whole. To heal. As a person prays, this divine activity comes into play on our behalf.

The prophet Joel records God as saying, "I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten" (Joel 2:25). Just think. You have God's own promise. He will restore what might have seemed irretrievable! As people glimpse this mentally in prayer, they begin to experience it in their lives.

Then the wholeness of a person's true nature—a completeness that doesn't fragment or disintegrate—comes into view. The God of all is Life, and Love, and Mind. These different names don't signify a God consisting of different parts that might splinter. Each term applies not just to a side of God but to the whole of Him. And each person is an expression of that divine wholeness. In other words, there's an intactness to each of us, created by God, that can never fall apart.

Mind's power to transform and heal us physically brings practical results. Speaking of this Mind, Science and Health says, "According to Scripture, it searches 'the joints and marrow,' and it restores the harmony of man" (p. 421). In Van's case, it restored not only his harmony but his dignity and self-worth, too. His resolve to "give back" aligned him with the restorative action of divine Love.

But how do you give back to a book? He took a practical step. He contacted a Christian Science nursing facility for people seeking spiritual healing and physical care. Though the manager had never met him, she took a chance. She created a position: maintenance, gardening, odd jobs, all for a pittance. He gladly took the position. It was only minutes before starting this new chapter that he finally discarded the last of his cigarettes. Some jittery days followed, but apart from a few minor slips, he never again returned to smoking or drinking.

He found a church, volunteered there on days off, and restored the neglected grounds. He uncovered dozens of small ways to forge a life of giving. Not surprisingly, an inspiring and profitable career opened up as he moved on to bigger opportunities and responsibilities in other locations.

It just shows how sweetly God blesses us, often in ways that are personally meaningful. Science and Health says,"...inspiration restores every part of the Christly garment of righteousness" (p. 242). Happily, that spiritual fact took on literal expression for Van. He became successful. But the main thing was that for the rest of his years, giving remained the heart of the matter—the joy of life restored.