Facial injuries completely healed

The greatest gift my mother gave me was Christian Science. Although my father was not a Christian Scientist, he witnessed my mother’s wonderful healing of a life-threatening condition and was quite willing for me to attend Christian Science Sunday School. I learned to cherish and trust the idea of a loving, caring God, much as a child trusts his or her parents’ wisdom.

At some point, however, the child has to make that wisdom his or her own through experience. Learning to know God better has become my lifework, and that spiritual journey began in earnest with a healing.

When I was about 11, I caught the wheel of my bicycle in the edge between the sidewalk and the grass parking strip. I remember nothing about the accident, but apparently I was thrown headlong into a palm tree (we didn’t have helmets back then) and then onto the sidewalk. I was near our home, and my mother came running out to help me. The injuries on my face were not a pretty sight. My mother called a Christian Science practitioner to pray with us, and my father spent that evening at my bedside. I was never in severe pain.

The next day I was able to speak with the practitioner myself. Even though I couldn’t move one side of my face, I felt no fear. The practitioner lovingly assured me that God knew nothing about an accident and would never allow one to happen. I understood this because of what I had learned in Sunday School—that God is Love and that Love cares for each of its ideas and always keeps them safe and in perfect harmony.

The practitioner also told me that I lived in Spirit, not a material body; that this ugly picture could not be true about me as God’s loved child. I believed this with all my heart. It seemed absolutely natural to me. I remember looking in the mirror and just refusing to believe that what I saw was me. I thought of it as a mask that simply needed to be removed because it really was never any part of me.

I was supposed to sing on stage with a trio for a school performance the next week. But it didn’t look as if I’d be able to perform, given my appearance. I asked my mom if we could wait and see, to which she reluctantly agreed.

“Time lapse photography” best describes that week. As we prayed, healing occurred naturally, but in “fast forward.” By the day of the performance, my face was completely normal, with new smooth skin and free movement of all muscles, except a tiny scab on my cheek, which came off soon after.

This experience has been a foundation to me. I’ve had many challenges and many healings since—of flu, colds, relationships, broken toes, a heart problem, panic attacks, to name a few—but the simplicity of this one continues to remind me that it is not my understanding of the truth that does the healing; it is the ever-present Christ, “the spiritual or true idea of God” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 347).

God, as Love, is constantly revealing perfection and completeness to each of us, as ours. When with humble, childlike trust I turn away from the false evidence of the material senses, to my true nature as the offspring of Spirit, healing inevitably follows.

Diana Davis Butler | Coarsegold, California, US