For more than 50 years I have relied only on prayer in Christian Science for healing and treatment of illness. I have been healed quickly, sometimes instantaneously, of cold and flu symptoms, severe back pain, sight and hearing problems, sprains and possible broken bones. Several years ago I was permanently freed from recurring migraine headaches.

I’d like to share one healing that has meant a lot to me. Over the course of several months I noticed increasing pain in my joints, and especially my hands and wrists. I love to cook, and my favorite pan is a cast iron frying pan I’ve had for 30 years. But I became unable to lift the pan without using both hands, and even that was painful. One day I realized that I didn’t have to just suffer with this pain, but that I could pray for God’s help. I quit thinking about buying a lighter frying pan, and every time I felt pain in my joints I prayed. It seemed to me that I was dealing with a problem that was related to age, so I prayed something like this.

Genesis 1 says that man is made in the image and likeness of God, and God must be eternal and immortal. Christ Jesus refers to man’s eternal life, and so I prayed to understand better my own life as the image of the eternal God. I felt certain that God didn’t have painful joints; in fact, when that thought came to me, I knew it was laughingly ridiculous. I reminded myself of that line in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy [God’s] will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,” and I added the spiritual interpretation of that verse as Mary Baker Eddy shared in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, which reads, “enable us to know, as in heaven so on earth, God is omnipotent, supreme.” I realized that omnipotent God could surely heal me, and even more, I felt that as the image of God, I was already whole and did not include any condition that would indicate a decline in my life.

I continued to work, and cook, as before, and in a very short time I realized that for a while I had been completely free from pain in any joints and that I had been using my cast iron pan regularly, even lifting it from the stove hot and full of dinner. I’m sure you can see how grateful I was, and still am, for this evidence of God’s tender, healing care. But my gratitude is greater still for a glimpse of the fact that our lives are eternal, and that any apparently self-destructive quality, in our characters or in our bodies, will be corrected as we gain clearer understanding of God and our real individuality as God’s children.

G.S.