“The healing was so quick I was actually a little shocked.”

I’d like to share a healing I had recently that was significant for me in a number of ways.

A couple of weeks ago, I found one of my hips very painful. One day it was painful but manageable, and the next day I had trouble walking and attending to the things I needed to do, including my job. My thought was flooded with fear and sudden recollections of the stories of all the people I knew who had had hip problems; one of them about my age had ended up having a hip replacement.

To begin with, all I could do was cling to a conviction that the medical “answer” was not for me; that I wanted Christian Science, no matter what the physical picture seemed to be. I prayed the best I could as I went through my day, but honestly it was difficult, and I did not feel a flood of inspiration.

As the day went on, the images of all those hip problems started to be replaced by testimonies I had read about healings of similar problems, and a recent, very decisive healing of my mom’s. She had woken one morning with an excruciating pain in her leg, hobbled down the road with the dog, and then felt she could go no further. She called a practitioner and they agreed to “insist vehemently” on the truth of her spiritual nature (S&H 421:15). She spent the morning in deep, fervent prayer, and when she got up to let the dog out, she was completely free!

That afternoon after work, I went home and sat with my family in the living room. As we chatted about the day, I felt a great sense of being loved. Yes, it was nice to be with my family, but this feeling was more than that; it was a feeling of being forgiven for my shortcomings, of being loved by God, no matter what!

The next morning, I was completely free. This healing was so quick that I was actually a little shocked! I didn’t feel I’d done enough to have made it happen—worked hard enough, been sufficiently uplifted—but there it was!

I’ve gone back over it and there are a few things that were going on, and are going on, that I’d like to mention:

1. I had started the Association assignment by reading Paths of Pioneer Christian Scientists and had been struck by a statement that Emma Thompson made to a young practitioner: “Don’t let the work worry you. Only do the best you can, and don’t for one moment hold the thought that anyone is sick and then expect to see them get well. There is no disease—then you have none to heal. Hold always the perfect, which means all are perfect in God, for God is All” (p.16).

2. This statement, along with the other reading I had been doing for the assignment, helped me move from “I don’t want medicine” to “I know that Christian Science can heal this” to “There is no ‘this’ to heal” to “All that is needed is a change of thought” to “Even if there is no change of thought, God is all, and I am His. It doesn’t even matter what I know humanly, because God already knows everything real about me.”

3. Since having this healing, I’ve come to see a little more about what healing is and that I am capable of it just as much as anyone else. The healing took place in spite of what I thought needed to happen, because it’s not about me, it’s about God!

So… I’m going to keep bearing witness to the love of God for Her creation. As the assignment makes so clear, it’s time to live the Christian Science that Mrs. Eddy saw saving humanity. We do that by healing what’s right in front of us, by not letting “the work worry [us]” and by doing “the best [we] can.”