A God we can know
Some time ago something happened that I never expected to happen, which changed my life forever. After going more than 30 years with no connection to God, or so I thought, I came to know God.
For some years I’d been suffering from a tremor in my right hand that became progressively worse. Other members of my family had suffered from similar symptoms. By the time I was in my early 30s, I began to almost exclusively use my left hand for writing, because it had become too painful and haphazard for me to write with my right hand. An orthopedic surgeon diagnosed the tremor and weakness in my hand as “focal action dystonia” and prescribed a medication, but it didn’t help at all.
Meanwhile, I had gotten married. My wife was a student of Christian Science, which as an atheist I felt was quite goofy. We didn’t discuss religion or God very much, but we tolerated each other’s beliefs. One day my wife and I were coming home from an event, and my hand was shaking so badly I could not get the key into the lock. And she said, “Look, you just have to do something.” So I agreed to talk with a Christian Science practitioner, someone whose ministry is to help others through prayer.
I made an appointment and went to the home of this practitioner, though I had no thought that I would be helped in any way. I described my heredity, and said that I had experienced the difficulty for years. And what she said to me was that my true inheritance was actually from God, not from other mortals, because God is my divine Father.
None of this made any sense to me. I had been an atheist from about the time I got out of college. I had no religious life. I was convinced that there was no God. But when the practitioner handed me a pen and some paper, I wrote effortlessly, without inconvenience, without pain, without shaking – for the first time in many, many years. I had been healed.
After my healing – and I mean immediately after my healing – I found that my thought had been transformed. I was as certain of the existence of God after my healing as I had been of the nonexistence of God before my healing. It was absolutely as if a light had been turned on in a pitch-black room. From the moment of that healing, I “saw” God. For me it was a dramatic proof of God’s power and existence.
I asked the practitioner what I needed to do to find out more about where that healing had come from. She encouraged me to buy my own copies of the Bible and “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science. So I did that. I opened my heart and read them both.
The interesting thing is that today my natural right-handed handwriting is not only better than my left-handed handwriting, but it’s better than it ever was before the symptoms that made me become left-handed.
Now my approach to life is hugely different from how it was before. For one thing, I wake up every day with great gratitude to God. I would say simply that I am in many ways a new man. I listen for the voice of God in all things. And I’ve had other healings, too, as a result of what I’ve learned in Christian Science.
I now know that I have never been unconnected to God. God was always present in my life, even though I denied His existence. I now see how God was guiding me and rewarding me every day without my help, without my assent, and, sadly, without my gratitude. Now I see God’s goodness, power, and love everywhere.
Adapted from an article published in the March 15, 2010, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
