Food poisoning healed

Eileen Hendrickson

Several years ago, I accepted an invitation from friends to dine with them at a restaurant serving types of food I had never eaten before. I ordered a soup and requested that the chef add only the minimum amount of spice.

Later that evening, I began experiencing symptoms of food poisoning. Within a short time I was in great discomfort. I immediately began to pray, and to help with my prayers I began to read from the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, where I located many statements regarding food. The most helpful one at that time was this: “Admit the common hypothesis that food is the nutriment of life, and there follows the necessity for another admission in the opposite direction,—that food has power to destroy Life, God, through a deficiency or an excess, a quality or a quantity” (p. 388).

As I prayed, I began to see that food could not really have power to destroy or harm. All that had power over me was divine Life, God. I did not have to accept common beliefs about poisons or other destructive elements in food. Rather, food, understood spiritually as an idea of God, has to have a spiritual substance, and could never harm but only bless, because it is of God. I continued my prayers along these lines and found some comfort and lessening of the symptoms.

On the second night, I recalled Jesus’ words, “If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them” (Mark 16:18). I continued praying to know that poisoning was not destructive to my real, spiritual identity, but rather nothing more than a common belief—not a fixed fact of life. I knew that nothing from the food itself could have an adverse effect on me, God’s spiritual child, forever safe in the care of divine Love.

Lying in bed, I reached out to God for more of these healing ideas, and the idea came to start praying the Lord’s Prayer. I did so, beginning with the first line, “Our Father which art in heaven,” followed by the spiritual interpretation given in Science and Health: “Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” (p. 16).

Suddenly, the word harmonious stood out. This was the message I needed to understand: There is nothing in God’s creation, no matter how small or large, that could be anything but harmonious. A spiritual idea is incapable of harming or being harmed in any way. With that recognition, all the symptoms vanished—the pain disappeared, my functions returned to normal—and I fell asleep. I am profoundly grateful that I found and have been healed by Christian Science.

Eileen Hendrickson
New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, US

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