No more need for glasses

When I was a teen, I got glasses for distance vision.

While I was attending college away from home, I began to study Christian Science on my own after my girlfriend (now my wife) introduced it to me. It just seemed to make sense and be very much in line with where I was already heading in my search for spiritual answers. I’d always had a strong sense that God was loving and caring for me on a regular basis. And I’d prayed for myself on occasion, experiencing healings before ever finding out that there was actually a Science involved in prayer.

In my sophomore year, after I’d been sincerely studying Christian Science for almost a year, I decided that wearing glasses was something that I needed to be healed of. Putting up with a visual impairment seemed incompatible with the spiritual ideas I was learning—that I was wholly spiritual, created in God’s image and likeness. If God created me perfect, why would a part of me have a deficiency or impairment? So I decided to pray for myself.

I also decided to throw away my glasses. That may sound radical, but it was an individual decision that I arrived at through inspiration. And since I didn’t have a car, and got everywhere on campus on foot, I didn’t have a need or an opportunity to drive. I truly felt that as long as the glasses were acting like a “crutch” at the end of my nose, it would be easy for me to ignore my decision, or coast along in my prayers without fully committing to complete healing. So in order to make sure that no one fished my glasses out of the trash, I buried them a bit in the trash can outside my dorm room.

At first I had to answer many questions from friends and professors like, “What happened to your glasses?” and, “Did you get contacts?” I don’t really recall how I answered them, but I simply sat in the front row of my classes and prayed to better understand that my true vision didn’t come from physical matter called eyes. I saw that since I was the image and likeness of God, who is divine Spirit, my substance must be spiritual. Therefore, my vision came from Spirit and was a spiritual attribute.

One of the phrases I considered from the Bible was, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29:18). To me, this meant that I must always act with deliberateness and purpose; I must always know why I am doing what I’m doing. All my actions should proceed from my understanding of God. This kind of vision, I realized, was the basis for reflecting God. Since God has infinite wisdom and vision, I had access to expressing those same qualities.

Over the next several months, I made big strides in terms of spiritual growth. Even though my schedule was packed with classes and ROTC involvement, I tried to take quiet moments to read the Christian Science Bible Lessons. My perspective improved when I paused to consider God in everything I did. There were many temptations to believe that I didn’t have time to study the Lessons or to pray. But I found that when I did this in spite of feeling that I didn’t have time, things went more smoothly and solutions to difficulties came more easily. Basically, I concluded that I didn’t have time not to pray!

I remember “testing” fairly often to see if my sight was any better. I’d look in the distance and gauge if things seemed clearer. They usually weren’t. Then one time, about four months after I stopped wearing my glasses, while riding in a van on a school trip to New Orleans, I looked out the window and everything in the distance was so clear. At first I was excited! But soon my sight went back to what I was used to. That was disheartening.

But then I realized that this showed me it was actually possible to be healed of a vision problem through prayer in Christian Science. So I kept praying, and gradually labeled myself less and less as a person with vision problems. Instead, I identified myself as a precious idea held in divine Mind. And I trusted this Mind to guide my studies and my career. At this point, I was confident that my healing would come.

I also stopped looking at matter to validate Spirit. In other words, I stopped trying to “fix matter” and then peeking to see if there’d been a change, which isn’t what Christian Science healing is all about. A line from Science and Health had always helped me sort out the standpoint from which I was praying: “It is mental quackery to make disease a reality—to hold it as something seen and felt—and then to attempt its cure through Mind” (Science and Health, p. 395). This made it clear to me that if I made a reality out of the problem, then I was getting in my own way. Real healing is a natural yielding to the divine Love that is always guiding and governing me. I just had to get my own limited “vision” of living out of the way.

Checking for results happened less and less in the coming months. I don’t really know exactly when the healing occurred, but when I renewed my driver’s license, about a year after first deciding to pray about my eyesight, I passed the vision test without my glasses. My vision was perfect. And it has remained so ever since. This happened about 20 years ago.

Howard Cornett | Syracuse, New York, US