Intestinal pain healed

The Gospel of Matthew gives an account of Jesus being “led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil” (see Matt. 4:1–11). Though it’s written as a colloquy between Jesus and Satan, I feel it could just as well have been presented as an internal dialogue, where Jesus emphatically triumphed over the attempts of the material senses to cause him to stumble. Science and Health defines wilderness in part as “the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence” (Science and Health, p. 597).

As I studied this account in some depth recently, I was reminded of a “wilderness” experience of my own. At the time, I was serving as a designer of large land development projects, both in the United States and overseas. In this instance, the project was located in the Middle East, while my client, an international contracting firm, was based in Europe. The client firm had summoned our US project team to meet with them. Our plane left the US late in the evening, arriving in Amsterdam early the following morning. Not having had much sleep during the flight, our team agreed to check into our hotel for a few hours’ rest before meeting again for lunch.

Later, as we were seating ourselves at a restaurant, and a waitress approached to take our orders, I was suddenly stricken with severe intestinal pains. These attacks were not unfamiliar. I’d been plagued with them off and on many times. The experience, though usually of short duration, was sometimes very intense, and once I’d briefly lost consciousness. I’d certainly prayed about these attacks, but hadn’t yet been able to eliminate them permanently.

Now, I was terrified. My companions, all good men, were not adherents of my faith, so I felt unable to turn to them for assistance. I didn’t speak the language of my host country, and I didn’t know how to locate a Christian Science practitioner, either locally or at home, for assistance. I felt alone and helpless.

My first thought was to reach out to God for some message of spiritual truth in order to feel His reassuring presence with me. The thought of being healed of the condition didn’t even occur to me at that moment. I simply wanted to know that God was right there with me. Immediately, as if spoken aloud, the thought came: “You don’t have to make God’s truth true. It already is. You have only to accept it.” Instantly, all the symptoms, which had seemed so real only a moment before, vanished. I was completely free. By the time the waitress arrived at my end of the table to take my order, I was able to make my selection. I enjoyed my meal, and that afternoon, carried out my mission as planned.

This experience was a turning point. Although I had future bouts with the attacks, each time they were less intense and occurred more infrequently. There was a new certitude in my spiritual outlook. The feeling of divine care that had surrounded me on that trip deepened my sense of God’s love. I saw that I could never be alone. I also gained a clearer recognition that my true identity was spiritual, not physical—that I wasn’t trapped in a self-acting material body. I grew in my understanding of my ability to prove that the divine reality of all life and being is exclusively in and of Spirit, and that error, including physical calamities, cannot stand in the presence of Love. Eventually, the attacks ceased altogether. The healing has been complete for more than 15 years.

In my “wilderness” experience, God had sent His healing Christ—the tender message of His love—to release me from a false material (physical) sense of what appeared to be happening to me. This enabled me to experience then and going forward the eternal spiritual fact—that what God knows of me as His expression, alone, is true.

James M. Coleman | Lake Oswego, Oregon, US