When God healed my family
Prayer based on an understanding of God and God’s perfect creation does more than comfort – it heals.
One day, as a work-at-home mom, a sudden and acute back pain made it very difficult for me to sit at my desk to work, or to care properly for my daughter. Then, when I wasn’t watching, my daughter leaped off the sofa, evidently dislocating her leg.
I began to pray immediately. While prayer may seem like an unconventional initial response to a physical emergency, I had learned through my study and experience of Christian Science that prayer can be the first and best aid in an emergency. Prayer that turns to the always-present healing Christ – revealing the truth of God as universal Love, caring for all creation – calms fear so that one can find the spiritual inspiration needed for any situation.
This kind of prayer does more than just comfort. I had observed the healing effects of this sort of prayer many times and was already praying for my own healing. I felt confident that the Christ could bring about a quick healing for my daughter, as well.
As I acknowledged divine Love’s caring and guiding presence in our home, my fear lessened, and I saw the wisdom of stabilizing my daughter’s movements with pillows. When she was comfortable, I asked her to stay still and watch her favorite cartoon, which she was happy to do, while I continued to pray for her healing.
That’s when my cat, Pookers, walked in, or rather heaved herself into the room, dragging one useless leg behind her. She, too, seemed to have a dislocation. So I turned to God in prayer asking what I needed to know to also help Pookers.
The Bible’s opening chapter teaches the reality of God’s creation as permanently good and healthy. In light of this, mortal limitations, pains, accidents, and fears can’t have any real basis in what God has made. Rather, mortal conditions are distortions that keep us from seeing the reality. Christ Jesus’ method of healing evidenced this. He exercised a spiritual sense that discerned both God and God’s creation as spiritual and perfect. This included seeing this perfect creation right where an otherwise discordant physical picture presented itself, including sickness or sin. This spiritual perception of his consistently produced healing.
In Christian Science, Jesus is understood to be the Way-shower. As such, I realized that an essential purpose of his life was to show us how to exercise the same spiritual sense and find healing. Through prayer we begin to see ourselves and everything that God made as it really is – spiritual, perfect, safe, sound, and vibrantly good – untouched by mortal misconceptions of what one’s experience may include.
As I prayed, I saw that no one needed to feel stuck in a false sense of what’s real and true – not my daughter, not me, and not Pookers. Whatever the cause of these injuries appeared to be was irrelevant, because God is the only actual cause, creator, or Mind, of us all.
This truth has a direct impact on our experience. “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, explains, “Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief and unite with the one Mind, in order to change the notion of chance to the proper sense of God’s unerring direction and thus bring out harmony” (p. 424).
I voiced aloud what I was seeing as spiritual truth, which applies to all of God’s creation: “You are as perfect as the Mind that made you. You are safe in the perfect Love that always cares for you.” And with that, Pookers stood, stretched, and walked off normally and well. Immediately afterward my daughter got up and was hopping around. With a click and snap, her leg had relocated itself properly in the socket. And I realized, with joy, that my back pain was also completely gone.
What I understood more deeply the day God healed us is that the perfect Mind that creates us is also the powerful Love that helps and heals. The revelation of the healing Christ in prayer is powerful enough to break any fear or experience of discord and pain.
Turning to God as the divine Mind and ever-present Love caring for us, we discover what God creates us, our children, and even our loved pets as – eternally God’s, and perfectly whole.