Around the time I became a student of Christian Science, I developed an aggressive skin condition that persisted over several years. During this time, I was working with a Christian Science practitioner who prayed daily for me, and I visisted him weekly in his office. At one point I went to see a medical doctor about the condition. He said I could try a form of long-term treatment, but he was not sure it could cure the condition. I decided to stay with prayer-based treatment.

At first my clothes covered the affected skin, but the condition continued to spread and moved toward my face. I was becoming increasingly afraid. During one tearful conversation with the Christian Science practitioner, he asked me about my expectations for healing. He was a loving person and cared deeply about me as a patient, so I wondered at first why he'd asked, when I certainly wanted to be healed. But while I could not understand what he meant, his reliance on God and expectation of healing were radical and firm, and the expression of God's love sometimes comes as a gentle wake-up message.

I went home after a long day and took a shower. As I showered, I prayed and thought about the practitioner's question. The opening verse of a hymn came to mind:

At that moment, I awakened to the spiritual truth that there is no life in matter—that life is spiritual because divine Spirit is its source—so it truly did not matter what the human body said was going on. Nothing could concern me but my love of God and my oneness with Him. When I stepped out of the shower, I realized that I was completely healed. The skin condition was gone, and it never returned.

I learned from this experience that the most important thing when healing is needed isn't making the body feel or look better. The important thing is awakening in some degree from the dream of living in matter. The reward in healing spiritually is the experience of our eternal connection with God.

Another healing that occurred in my family many years ago proved significant to my own healing practice. I received a call from a neighbor of my parents saying that I was needed at their home immediately. I called a Christian Science practitioner to pray for me, and started praying myself, declaring aloud the presence and power of God, and the consequent absolute unreality of evil. I affirmed that my parents were loved and cared for by their heavenly Father.

Upon arrival, I found that my dad was paralyzed. I asked him if I could pray for him (he was not a Christian Scientist). He nodded yes. I prayed silently, acknowledging the perfection of God, and of the man that God had created. I remember thinking that my dad was at one with God, and because God creates only what is like Himself, my dad was whole, undistorted—perfect in form and substance. I affirmed that the Christ, the presence and power of Spirit, kept him untouched by negative beliefs about health and mortality. I knew, too, that the divine Principle that created my father was Love itself, and that this Principle controlled every action of his being.

As I prayed in this way, I felt at peace and the fear dissipated. I closed my treatment by asserting that my dad, and the spiritual facts that I'd known about him, were hid with Christ, in Truth.

We called a doctor, who came and examined my father. The doctor told us that my father had had a paralytic stroke, adding that he would have to live out the rest of his life in that condition. I silently said to God, "Dear God, I have taken every word of the textbook, Science and Health, to my heart, and I demand to see the healing power of the Truth." The doctor called an ambulance, told us that he would meet us at the hospital, and then left.

In less than a minute after I'd made another call to the practitioner I'd spoken with earlier, my father was able to move freely again. In fact, he was fully healed. But out of respect for his physician, he went to the hospital. When we arrived and the doctor saw my father, he said, "I have been a physician for over 40 years and have never seen anything like this." My father had no recurrence of this condition, and he lived about seven more years.

Witnessing this remarkable healing firsthand helped me understand the greatness and goodness of God, and the immediacy of His care. It opened my thought to the idea of becoming a Christian Science practitioner. Two years later, I began advertising my own healing practice in The Christian Science Journal.

RUTH KARP
WOODMERE, NEW YORK