Cycles of divine Life
When I was reading about the controversy over the effectiveness of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), I completely related to women's fears about side effects. I was a medically trained nurse, and I was used to administering drugs. I depended on medications myself. I had never known any other way.
At one point in my life, I had to decide whether to use HRT. It was offered as the only way forward for me. Hormone replacement was expected to enable women to regain lost womanhood and to protect them from diseases that threaten women.
I had been in the hospital for nearly six weeks. The surgeons had performed an emergency hysterectomy, and I hadn't regained my original strength and health. One minute I was a young woman of childbearing age, and the next minute I was menopausal. I decided not to go back to the hospital for treatment and hormone therapy replacement. I wanted an alternative solution.
For 18 months I looked into every method of healing. I was restless. I wanted to be able to do everything normally again - all the things I'd been doing before I was taken ill.
I looked for a connection with God. I was scared of a life that was changeable and insecure. I needed to challenge instability, and this impelled me to search for my spiritual origin.
By total coincidence, a man at a party shared an idea with me. I didn't know it then, but what he shared would change the course of my life. He told me about Mary Baker Eddy and her book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." He didn't know that I'd been looking for healing. I had never heard of spiritual healing before, and here were people who had relied on it for all types of healing for over a century.
I couldn't wait to find this book. And when I did, I bought a copy. From there started the most exciting journey of my life.
I began intense study of the book. At first there were passages I didn't always connect with. But I kept reading. Things would come to me that would stop me in my tracks. They made me think and reflect. Suddenly the answers would come clearly to me.
As I read, I would remember incidents from my childhood or more recent past, and each one was significant. I realized that these incidents were coming back to me for a reason. The new insight I was gaining was shedding light on the past and was leading to healing and release. Or in some cases it provided the answer to something I hadn't understood earlier.
I was discovering a whole new world of divine Spirit that was guiding me and directing my thinking and awareness.
Reading this book also gave me a new view of life around me. I saw that regardless of gender, each of us, myself included, had a spiritual identity made up of spiritual qualities. And each one was unique in God's purpose and was the complete and full reflection of God as the only Creator.
I'd always had heavy menstrual cycles, and having been brought up in the Middle East, the myth and superstition attached to women go back centuries. The menstrual cycle is based on the lunar cycle, which points to an earth-based creation. But in Science and Health I discovered something new: There is only one divine cycle of light, and it has no correlation with a lunar cycle.
I discovered my roots in God as my only Parent and myself living in the cycle of divine Life. This divine Life that I reflected was changeless; it didn't have seasons, times, and places. It was constant. I was held in this cycle of Life, forever loved and cherished. I became calm and confident of God's care for me. This new spiritual attitude restored my strength. It gave me new vigor.
In many ways, the illness was a turning point for a new start. Spiritual healing had been a foreign concept to me, and I might not have had occasion to look into it. But since then I have relied on it radically for the past 13 years with good results. Now it is the most natural direction for me to take.
I am the Lord,
I change not.
Malachi 3:6
