A Healing Insight While Shopping One Day

        Several years ago, I was out hiking one beautiful October day through a wooded area some streets over from our house.  I jumped over a fence when nearly home.  The fence wasn't so high actually, it's just that I landed crooked.  The pain in my ankle was severe.  I managed to hobble into the house, and as my husband was standing there in the kitchen, I asked him to help me prayerfully with this problem.

        The rest of that afternoon and evening were challenging. But I knew from years of experience that God is always present to heal us.  I felt confident relying totally on His help, and prayed fervently to realize my selfhood as God's spiritual image and likeness.  I reminded myself that man as made by God--my true and only identity--was spiritual, not material, and not subject to physical suffering.

        To my relief, when I got out of bed the next morning, I could place a little pressure on this foot.  This encouraged me to keep praying.  Improvement continued all that day, and by evening, I found I could attend a homeowner's meeting around the next cul-de-sac.  I did have to go down some stairs to their basement for the meeting, which I had to take slowly.  And most interesting, our host was in a chair with one foot proper up on another chair.  He told us he had badly injured his ankle playing basketball.  And this is the part that stood out to me and made me so grateful for Christian Science:  the doctor said he'd be off that leg for about six weeks. 

        Feeling almost one hundred percent back to easy mobility, I decided to do some errands downtown.  I was shuffling along a street having just left a shop when something happened I've never forgotten.  A spiritual insight stopped me cold on the sidewalk.  With crystal clarity, I saw that the injury and pain were not part of me, had never been part of me.  "Why, I don't have to creep along with this difficulty.  There's no need for gradual improvement.  This never happened to me as God's reflection!"

        Instantly, I felt something being adjusted physically.  The remaining discomfort disappeared.  While it's hard to put into words, I knew and felt that I was completely healed, right then and there.  I walked on freely and normally.  This experience showed me the mental nature of recuperation.

        Mary Baker Eddy writes in Unity of Good, "Jesus required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for perfection and its possibilities."  Time does not actually enter into Christian Science healing.  Why is this?  Because what appears to be a physical problem is, in reality, wholly mental.  It is but a phase of mortal belief, objectified.  As it becomes clear that we're not dealing with a real condition that needs to be changed but only with an erroneous mental state, a misconception of man's true spiritually-intact selfhood, we stop being afraid of or impressed with debility.  What appears real to erring human belief is not a reality to man in God's likeness. It has never been real at all. Our need, therefore, is always for a change of consciousness from a material to a spiritual basis, to the recognition that God is perfect and that we are His perfect, spiritual reflection--now and forever.  This enlightened mental state is then objectified in our experience as healing, as normality and freedom.

        As it was for me in this experience I've shared.