Lump in breast healed

In the summer of 2007, while in the shower, I discovered a lump in my breast. Being a lifelong Christian Scientist, I immediately turned to God in prayer, vehemently denying the possibility of anything harmful attaching itself to me. I’d learned that as God’s image and reflection, I was created spiritual, whole, and invulnerable.

But over the next few hours I found myself swinging like a pendulum between fear and hope. In my calmer moments I clung to the idea that “a spiritual idea has not a single element of error, and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 463). This assured me that whatever appeared in my body as an abnormality could not have any substance.

My boyfriend, who has since become my husband, gently supported me in prayer, and his calm, unfazed attitude had a profound effect on my thought. It helped me take a firm stand on a spiritual foundation of prayer.

The next day my young goddaughter and parents came to visit. As I was holding her, pain in my breast became most aggressive, and I had to put her down. Suggestions that perhaps I’d never see this dear little girl grow up clouded over me.

I felt the need for some extra prayerful support. I picked up the phone and called a Christian Science practitioner. Her calm, unswerving conviction that my “spiritual innocence had never been touched” filled my thought. She concluded by saying that, although she did not know anything about my past, it had come to her to say that if anyone had ever hurt me deeply, I really needed to forgive them and erase the experience.

Wow! I came off the phone and felt the tears streaming down my face. Virtually six years to that day, I had faced a very difficult crisis in an important relationship, which had left me feeling frightened, shocked, and very much alone.

God’s plan for me since then had been evident. The most wonderful things had come into my experience, and I knew that “right” had indeed “won the day” (see Christian Science Hymnal, No. 86). However, I quickly realized I had kept a false anniversary by marking the date of that difficulty, even by telling myself each year how much stronger I was and how much I had progressed. By doing this I was really reawakening old feelings of hurt and resentment.

Then and there, I resolved to relinquish all thoughts of a painful material history and let my heart and thought be “full of light,” as the practitioner suggested. It took dedicated prayer to stick to this new way of looking at my life. But as I did, the fear that I might not be healed without medical intervention, or worse still, that I might pass on, subsided, and my thinking became calm and clear. Sunlight flooded through the window in my bedroom, and I tangibly felt God’s love touching and nurturing me.

As a teacher, I was on school summer holidays at that point, and I was most grateful for the extra time I was able to dedicate to prayer. I kept praying several hours each day for myself, as well as for others, to see that the world’s belief about the symptoms I was experiencing could have no hold over me or anyone.

Within three days of this concentrated prayer, all the symptoms I had experienced vanished. My thoughts were light and full of joy.

Not long after, the suggestion came to me that perhaps this healing had been too simple. Before I knew it, I felt the old symptoms creeping back. I reaffirmed all the spiritual truths I’d been considering previously, and this reinforced the foundation of prayer on which I’d been building.

That same night I looked up an article titled “The Smell of Fire” (Louise Knight Wheatley, The Christian Science Journal, March 1920). In it the author noted that “the smell of fire … the remembrance of the sting of it” was not on Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who had been thrown into a fiery furnace (see Dan. 3:1–17).

I pondered the spiritual ideas shared in this article in depth. It became clear to me that we do not need to relive a healing we have through prayer, but should rather give thanks and then keep our thought soaring high, focusing on God and not on the material circumstances involved.

There was my answer. I understood that I was never a mortal who had overcome a terrible disease and was now “better.” I had never really been fighting off the “fire” of a threat to my health and happiness, because I always was, and always would be, God’s perfect daughter, untouched by a mortal history.

Within hours of this recognition, the pain vanished, and the healing was complete. I have been free for a year now. Hallelujah!

Liz Bremner-Smith | Warwickshire, England