Blood infection, fever quickly healed
When today’s contributor faced a life-threatening situation shortly after giving birth, a tangible sense of God’s limitless love melted her fear, and healing immediately followed.
I was supposed to be heading home from the hospital with my new baby, but I was too sick to care. I had a fever, and my obstetrician said I’d have to stay put another day. Soon after he left the room, I rapidly began to feel worse and hit the call button, managing only to say “Help” before passing out. It was later determined that I had a serious blood infection.
When I came to, there were two nurses in my room, along with my husband. One of the nurses said the situation was very serious. I could tell from her tone that she meant it, and it occurred to me that she thought I might die.
I remember thinking, “I’ve waited my whole life for this baby, and I’m not going anywhere now.” At that point, I told my husband to call a friend who was also a Christian Science practitioner (someone whose ministry is dedicated to helping others find healing through Christian Science) for help.
When he got the practitioner on the phone, I reached for the receiver and heard my friend say with so much confidence, “‘Perfect love casteth out fear,’ and your life just increased in love one hundredfold with the birth of this baby.” With that, the fever broke (something the nurses were clearly not expecting), and I felt instantly well.
Even better, I felt a love that was so much bigger than even my intense love for my newborn daughter. It was God’s love, and that’s what healed me. It was an incredibly powerful experience.
Since there was nothing for the nurse assigned to me to do, we spent the day chatting. She couldn’t believe that I’d been lucid throughout much of the experience. She said she’d never heard of an adult who’d survived a fever that high without sustaining brain damage.
I hadn’t reasoned out anything or prayed specifically in that moment. The healing happened so quickly that I didn’t have time. But the phrase “perfect love casteth out fear” comes from a section in the Bible discussing the immense love God has for His children and how this wipes out anything in our lives that wouldn’t or couldn’t come from God, who is limitless Love itself.
Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, plainly described this spiritual remedy for fever in her book “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” She wrote, “Destroy fear, and you end fever” (p. 376). That’s what I experienced. I found out that fear dissolves when we catch a glimpse of and/or feel the ever-presence of divine Love – a presence that makes anything that is unlike God impossible. You can’t have limitless good with even a little bit of something bad. That wouldn’t be ever-present good, then, would it? On this basis we can trust that what God created is good. Anything that seems otherwise is a mistaken sense of spiritual reality.
Now, more than two decades later, what I remember most about that day was the all-embracing love I felt from God. The thought of it is always there when I need it most, to remind me of the never-ending love that’s ours all the time, under every circumstance. This kind of understanding and peaceful sense of God’s love has improved not only my health, but also my relationships with friends, family, and even strangers.
God loves each of us endlessly, and as we accept our true nature as the spiritual expression of that love, we can experience how divine Love heals.