Symbols or Science?

I had a moment of insight that brought an instantaneous physical healing. Perhaps you can relate. Healing often happens when we glimpse an inspiration about God, discover a higher sense of a certain Scripture, or move beyond a fixed opinion about something to gain a more spiritual view.

This phenomenon is explained in Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in this way: “The rays of infinite Truth, when gathered into the focus of ideas, bring light instantaneously, whereas a thousand years of human doctrines, hypotheses, and vague conjectures emit no such effulgence” (p. 504).

A few years ago, I was praying about an injured knee, in which normal comfort and strength hadn’t been apparent for some time. That week, the Bible Lesson outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly contained the Bible story of the man by the pool of Bethesda who couldn’t walk until Jesus healed him (see John 5:2–9). Because I had read the story hundreds of times, I was tempted to skim it rather than really studying it, just to see how it fit into the Lesson.