“…when we make a demonstration, the healing is not just for ourselves”
/Healings I have experienced in the last 12 months:
Direction and deeper harmony in personal relationships
Clarity of purpose, place, and direction in my career as a Christian Science Nurse
Continued working and being able to save money uninterrupted amid the pandemic
A sense of friendship and connectedness restored out of the isolated feeling of quarantine during the pandemic
Freedom from fear while nursing an individual who was isolating due to fears of symptoms potentially indicating the presence of COVID
Beautiful freedom of every patient in the facility from experiencing COVID-related beliefs despite the facility’s physical location at the U.S. epicenter of COVID
A deeper sense of inspiration in my work and life, in general, has been restored this past year. I’ve found more time and room to create paintings that have provided a wonderfully creative avenue of prayer and a way to share spiritual insight and healing with the world in a tangible and meaningful way.
Just recently I experienced healing of chronic pain in my back. This was partly with the support of a practitioner and partly the result of simply trusting it to God and forgetting all about it until I realized it was gone, while I couldn’t say exactly when.
Recently I’ve felt the impulse to reach out and offer prayer to various friends around the U.S. I ended up taking four cases; three of them were completely healed within the first week and an additional case was healed without my knowledge through a simple conversation about healing. I was not even aware of the challenge or how the healing took place until after it was complete.
I have the permission of these friends to share these cases of healing with our Association.
The conversation arose out of a struggle I had been finding with feeling disheartened by the chronic cases I was working with as a Christian Science nurse and was searching for assurance that “progress is the law of God.” I began to recognize more clearly that right where there doesn’t seem to be an outward change, there is still progress going on and the healing is inevitable. I turned to Peter Henniker Heaton’s healing experience and thought about how he didn’t experience outward progress for nine years but in the 10th year, he gradually experienced complete healing from a range of seemingly severe challenges. It is so inspiring to me that simply desiring to know more about healing and purely sharing this with a friend could result in God’s great healing power to be seen and felt most tangibly.
The added beauty to this experience is that my friend was struggling with the same belief that I had been for several years. I can’t help but feel that the demonstration that had been made in my own experience with overcoming a chronic challenge with my back helped me to impart this understanding without directly talking about it or even knowing that they needed help with this. It illustrated to me that when we make a demonstration the healing is not just for ourselves, but it ripples out to bless humanity in unexpected ways.
The next was a case of depression and anxiety. The individual had been working at it for a while and had made great progress already but was having trouble accepting the healing that had already gone on and still often woke up feeling dark and anxious. I took up the work and listened carefully for what was needed.
The idea that “The way to extract error from mortal mind is to pour in truth through flood-tides of Love.” (SH p. 201:17) came very strongly.
I kept my metaphysics very simple, both how I worked alone with God and what I shared through calls and texts. Just held to the allness of divine Mind, and the infinitely loving nature of Love. I shared a favorite passage I worked with in earlier years when I too struggled with depression:
“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.” (Psalms 139:17, 18)
These ideas resonated strongly with my friend who was so grateful to have someone else praying for them while they went about their Christian Science nursing duties. I emphasized that they could stop specifically working on this challenge and just relax in the arms of divine Love. In just a day or two, we gained momentum in the direction of really feeling Love’s presence and protection. And by the end of the week, they felt so free that they knew the healing was complete.
I was exceptionally grateful to feel complete freedom from any personal sense of responsibility for making the healing happen. I was buoyed by the understanding that God is the only healing power and because God truly is all-powerful the healing just would happen.
My friend felt this spiritual confidence and responded quickly. Again, this was a belief that I was very familiar with from years of struggling with it in my own life. I’m grateful to see how God revealed healing for me that has in turn enabled me to know and seeing healing for others.
Another case was a friend who was challenged by a strained relationship with her father. I worked simply with the idea of man’s innocence and perfectly harmonious relation with the one divine parent.
I love to work with the first line of the Lord’s Prayer and Mary Baker Eddy’s spiritual interpretation of it:
Our Father which art in Heaven
Our Father-Mother God, all harmonious.
This alone is enough to “cover the whole ground.” Great progress was made in just three days with a bit of an explosive moment of chemicalization, followed by deeper love, harmony, and peace between her and her dad. I will add that following this healing moment her mother called a practitioner, so I stopped working and left it to them to finish up the work. I was grateful to hear later that the healing had proven solid and harmony was restored.
I am grateful for this new experience of praying for multiple people at once and finally to be getting on with some healing work and seeing quick and whole healing. It is more apparent than ever that we simply turn to witness the Truth and God shows it to us and those we are praying for. Healing is inevitable, whatever the challenge.
I would like to add the experience of my grandmother who was taken to hospital and diagnosed with pneumonia. They tried treating her but found no progress and stopped, concluding she would soon pass on. My mother and Grandmother are both Christian Scientists, but my aunt and uncle are opposed to Christian Science. So, this was a sensitive time for my mum to work out how to navigate the approach to her care around these opposing opinions. A practitioner took up the work as soon as the medical treatment stopped, and she had a beautiful overnight healing which was transformative to her character and has proven to improve her relationship with my mum which had previously been quite strained and stressful. She woke up beaming with a truly radiant face which had not been her normal demeaner. Since then, my mother has continued to look after her at our home with the help of some practical nurses (compromising with the aunt and uncle that Christian Science nurses were not allowed to work with her).
I have been grateful to read the Bible Lesson with my grandma over the phone and share ideas from my Christian Science Nurse training and experience supporting my mother in looking after her. An especially helpful hymn for overcoming any false sense of personal responsibility has been:
I place them in Your hands, dear God, / I trust them to Your care, /
The One who marks the sparrow‘s fall / And numbers every hair. /
You cherish and You guard them all / From snares of every kind. /
No false responsibility / Disturbs my peace of mind. /
Your love, far greater than my own, / Provides for them all good. /
This have I learned—to humbly trust / Your father-motherhood.
(Christian Science Hymnal, No. 502:1–3)