 Thank you so much. How are we doing on sound? You all hear me? Great. Okay. Thank you so much. It is so wonderful to be back in Wisconsin. I think it was some 17, 18 years ago the last time that I was here lecturing down in Milwaukee. So I'm perhaps recognizing some of your some of your lovely useful faces. It's always a pleasure to be here. Finding God, finding health is the subject of our talk today. I'm going to be speaking to you for about an hour on this subject and then we're going to have an opportunity for an open question and answer period for those of you who'd like to stay. That will go up until they kick us out of the library, which will be about 8 o'clock. So if questions come up as we're going through and I don't cover them, hold on to them because it's likely your question is a question others have as well and it'll be something that we can discuss further if you'd like to stay after. But I'll just jump right in and I'd like to tell you a story about a little boy who lived next door. His mother would read a book to him every night about how the stars in the sky were like God's eyes watching over his creation. Now of course she wanted little Brian Jay to feel comforted and loved by the idea that God was watching over him before he would go to sleep. But one night she came into his room and his shades were pulled down as tight as they could be and the covers were up to his chin and she said Brian Jay what's the matter? And he replied I don't like all those eyes watching me. Poor little Brian was suffering from a misconception of what God is and what God does. Perhaps he'd been a little naughty that day. We don't really know. But what we do know was he didn't like the idea of a bunch of eyes watching him and possibly even preparing to punish him. Well Christian science gives to the world a view of God as good and only good. Not just good as an adjective as in a good God but good itself is God. The principle of good is what God is. Christian science expands one's God vocabulary giving access to what the Bible teaches about the true nature and being the essence of what God is. I think it acts a lot like a prism. You know how a prism can take a beam of light and open it up, divide it so that you can see in detail all the beautiful color in that light. Well Christian science through its prism exposes God, expands one's sense so that you can see God in detail. Finding God, finding a broader deeper, clearer sense of God you find yourself as the reflection of God to be spiritual, healthy, whole, blessed. Yes, health. Health is an attribute of one's spirituality. Find God to be spirit and you find yourself to be God's spiritual creation. God's spiritual being, health is included in that package. Finding God involves more than just adding a little more spirituality into an otherwise materialistic life. It's not about adding anything in fact to life. Finding God involves finding God to be spirit, to be the actual source of all being, of all life. Spirituality is a natural expression of spirit. Many people struggle over the concept of God to know what God is. I think that sometimes there's just a sense that God is too much, that ultimately God is even unknowable. I think it's a lot like looking at the sun. You can't do it for a long time. Even if you really, really want to, there's this natural built-in resistance to looking at the sun. And yet scientists are able to look at the sun. They're able to study the sun. They're able to see it in great detail to see the depth and breadth of what that sun is in great detail, without any harm to themselves and for long periods of time. Well, Christian science provides a lens. Just like those scientists are able, through a lens, to be able to study that sun, Christian science provides a lens through which we can look at God. We can see and experience the depth and breadth and being of God. What is Christian science? Well, Christian science explains the healing work of patriarch, prophet, disciple, apostle, of Christ Jesus himself, and of early Christians after Jesus walked the earth for the first couple of hundred years, as well as many today who are practicing healing through prayer. I mentioned that it was a general practice for those first couple of hundred years and then lost sight of for a period of time, although there have always been bright lights. There have always been certain individuals throughout human history that have had a natural, intuitive sense of who God is and have been able to heal. But as a general practice, it was lost sight of. Now, because Christian science is an actual science, it's always existed. Who here can tell me when math was invented? When did math science, you know, get it started? Who came up with that idea? It wasn't invented. It's always existed. New discoveries are constantly being made in math, which gives us more freedom to do calculations further and broader. But it's always existed as a science. It's the same with Christian science. The laws of God, the understanding of the true nature of God that Jesus had that enabled him to be able to heal has always existed. Although it's been a general practice and then lost sight of until it was reintroduced through its discovery in 1866. And in order to understand the modern practice of Christian science, it's helpful to look to the life of the one who did discover it. At that time, American religious and health reformer, Mary Baker Eddy. Mary Baker, as she was known, got her start in the early 1800s, in the 1820s in fact. She was born to Orthodox Christian parents in the northeast United States of New Hampshire. Mary was brought up in a deeply religious culture. It was a time when religion was the backbone of family life, and her family was no different. They were very devoted Christians. She grew up on the scriptures. Bible study and prayer was part of the fabric of daily life for young Mary. She had an intuitive sense, even from a young girl, an interest in God, a love for God, that was manifest in a voracious appetite for scripture study. Her early Bible that she'd had throughout her young years is still in the archives of the Christian Science Church. And you'll find in that Bible in the margin all kinds of notes showing how she dove into scripture. It wasn't just a surface thing for her. It was the heart of her young life. She loved God, and she loved the God that she found in her scriptures. But she was also very interested in the sciences that were just developing at that time. Particularly, she was interested in finding God in science, as well as finding science in God. In her early years as a young adult, she would pursue a study of many of the burgeoning studies and sciences that were coming up, looking for that link between science and spirituality, between God and health. She looked into allopathic medicine, which was going through a number of changes. Homeopathy was relatively new to the human scene, maybe 30, 40 years, but was becoming a more general practice. Hydropathy, a number of what you would call alternative health methods she was interested in, even to the extent of becoming a practitioner of some of these methods if she found that they were helpful to her or to others. She would ultimately drop each one of these methods as she continued to pursue her interest, her desire to find a more consistent explanation for the link between God and health. However, there were certain things she learned from this foray into the sciences, the physical sciences, the medical sciences. And one thing in particular was that she observed across the board, regardless of method, that the morality and the spirituality of the healer, of the practitioner, of the doctor, impacted outcomes. The more moral the healer, the more spiritually minded the healer, the more likely they were, regardless of the method they employed, the more likely they were to be able to be helpful to produce positive results. Now as I said, she would abandon each one of these methods, but she continued to hold onto her Bible to guide her through this search, this pathway, this journey that she was on as she was looking for that link between God and science, between spirituality and health. There was a point, she was in her 30s when it was a point of crisis in her life. She had been desperately ill for a long time, bedridden for a very long time. Explored went back to some of these methods that had been helpful to her earlier, but they couldn't cure her, and so she set them aside once again. At a point of deep desperation, at a particularly low point, she reached out to God and made a promise that if he would cure her, that she would devote the rest of her life to helping sick and suffering humanity. Well, shortly after she made that promise, she was suddenly well. She was up strong and able to move forward with her life, and it was a promise that she never forgot. She would immediately, following that healing, take up a renewed study of the Bible, focusing in particular on the New Testament, the part of the Bible devoted to Jesus' life and teachings and his healing work. What she found in this study was that Jesus expected his followers to heal the sick, and he expected them to use the same method that he was using. Now, she determined that the method that Jesus used was of spirit, was of God, and so she concluded that the only true method, healing method, must be the spiritual method. She didn't yet know what this method was, but she did say that at a point of crisis that soon followed, this was what was in her thought, that the true spiritual healing method must be the spiritual method. Now, the circumstances around this crisis, which jettisoned her off in an entirely new direction of discovery, it involved a bad fall, the after-effects of a bad fall. She was taken up in an insensible condition, and over the course of three days, her condition badly deteriorated. Her physician diagnosed her with a possible spinal dislocation and a bad concussion. As her condition deteriorated, she was in and out of consciousness. She was aware that in the next room, friends and family had gathered. The expectation was that she would not survive her injuries. And at a dark moment on that third day, she asked in a moment of lucidity for her Bible to be brought to her. And she opened it to a story of Jesus healing someone. And upon reading that story, she had a spiritual breakthrough, an experience of the presence of God with her. And it produced this moment of enlightenment, produced a spontaneous abatement of all the symptoms that had kept her bedridden for those three days. She was suddenly well. She was suddenly strong without fear, without pain. And she got up out of that bed and walked into the next room, completely startling the people that had gathered, expecting she wasn't going to make it through the weekend. As you can imagine, this was a profoundly spiritual experience for her, to be in such bad straits and to find herself suddenly in the presence of God well. Well, this experience, while she, as yet, did not have an explanation for what had happened to her, she would mark that as the turning point, as a moment or an opening, you could call it, into a period of discovery. Christian science was not discovered like an apple falling from a tree, bonk, hit her on the head, she's well, and then, wow, we have the whole science. It doesn't work that way. I know those of us who've struggled through math class wish that great discoveries and that new information would come that way. That's not how it happened. Rather, you could say that that experience opened the door to a nine-year period of discovery, during which she devoted all of her time and attention to searching the Scriptures, not just limited to the New Testament Scriptures, but going from Genesis to Revelation, searching the science of the Christ, searching what it was that Jesus knew about the nature of God, the true nature of God, that would enable him to heal. Well, that period of discovery was an exciting period. She was learning things. It was through Revelation. She had deep insights that came to her as she was devoted to this tremendous study, research, as well as application, demonstration of what she was learning through healing the sick. And wonderful healing was going on. She would ultimately conclude to the shock of her contemporaries that God is not only an aid to healing an assistant to be called in at the last minute to hopefully save one, but that in fact God is the only true healer. She would further conclude that true healing is a spiritual phenomena, a revelation of an intact state, an intact relationship that we all have with God, and that matter and material methods have nothing to do with an actual state of health. As I said, it was kind of shocking to her contemporaries, and she met with enormous resistance, enormous resistance to this, and yet she persevered against pretty fierce opposition because she was convinced that what she had discovered, what she was in the process of discovering, was the actual comforter that Christ Jesus promised would come to us in order to help us learn to care for ourselves and to others, to heal and to be healed. One of her fierce critics was Mark Twain. So much so, he even wrote a book about Christian science. Boy, something about Mary Baker Eddy just irked him. So he put this whole book together as a form of criticism, and yet he was a closet admirer of this woman who had the audacity to step out before the world and say that God is all and matter is nothing when it comes to matters of health and wellness. So he had this respect for her, so much so that buried deep in this book that was intended to trash Mrs. Eddy. And in several ways, she is the most interesting woman that ever lived and the most extraordinary. I can tell you two stories just off the top of my, off the top of my thought of healings that were affected through Mary Baker Eddy's practice, Mary Baker Eddy as she's known today, through her practice of these ideas that she was just beginning to discover, some 10 months after her own healing after she had already begun researching the scriptures. She encountered little Georgie Norton, a little seven-year-old boy who had never walked. He was born with two club feet, and yet he was healed through one prayer treatment given by Mary Baker Eddy when she encountered him on a beach one day. John Greenleaf Whittier. We all know who that is, right? When I'm speaking to my French audiences, it's not always a guarantee that they know who he is. Well, John Greenleaf Whittier was suffering from an advanced stage of tuberculosis when Mary Baker Eddy paid him a visit one day and in one prayer treatment he was healed. Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, had deep, great respect for Mary and what it was that she was giving to the world. She said Mrs. Eddy should have the respect, admiration, and love of the whole nation for she is its greatest woman. Well, nine years, this period of discovery from 1866 to 1875 was finally concluded by the publication of her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. This book includes the full statement of the science that she discovered. It was first published in 1875 and yet it continued to be developed for the next 30 or so years as she, 35 years in fact, as she was looking to refine the vocabulary in order to express in a simple 600 pages the full science that would explain what Jesus knew that allowed him to heal the sick and the sinning. You see the full salvation of the Christ includes both. Both physical healing as well as moral healing. I'd like to tell you a little bit about what me brings me in front of you today. I was introduced to Christian science by my parents who put me in a Christian science Sunday school in the local church. They had been introduced through the healing of my father who was, he'd come back from World War II suffering from acute depression and a woman who lived next door to my grandmother was a Christian scientist. She prayed for him, he was healed and that's what brought Christian science before our family was this wonderful healing. So I grew up and as many young people do you have to find for yourself if what your parents are telling you and your Sunday school teachers are telling you if it's really true and I had a moment when I was 12 years old where I impaled my foot on a nail, a rusty nail and I found, I had a choice pray now or walk three blocks to get to the local hospital. Prayer was faster. So of course I prayed right away and the healing was so rapid that it became irrelevant. I didn't even have to go to the hospital. So it was a real turning point for me. Sent me off very deep into my own interest in Christian science. It wasn't just something my parents handed to me. It was something I was putting into practice. And later on, a few years later I trained to be a Christian science nurse. Christian science nurses are people who are trained to give physical care to those that are relying on Christian science but are not well to care for the body. Following that I became a Christian science practitioner. That's someone who is devoted to helping others find healing through prayer. So it sounds like, you know, I probably knew a little bit about what was going on in Christian science, right? And I kind of felt at this point like my life was going really well. I was seeing a lot of healing. I was experiencing healing whenever I needed it. Things were going really well until a point of crisis. And this was when that, it was this awful moment when my husband, my first husband, suddenly and unexplainably passed on. I was laid flat. I felt obliterated. My world exploded. My face certainly exploded. It's not that I doubted God's presence. It's not that I doubted God's existence. I had too much experience, too many healings. I'd seen too much at this point. It couldn't be undone. But I did definitely doubt God's goodness. And I doubted God's interest in me. I no longer felt favored. I felt neglected. I felt separated from God. Well, I had a friend who knew that I was in crisis. And she called me every day to see how I was. It was so annoying. She called me every single day and always asked me, how are you? And every day I said, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I wasn't fine. But I just didn't want to talk to her about it. Well, one day, just through her persistent love, she continued to ask the same question. And one day I said, when she asked, how are you? I said, I'm angry. And she said, at who? I didn't know. I didn't know. At that point, it just felt so good to tell somebody that I was angry. But I hadn't really thought about the implications of that anger. It didn't even seem to be directed. I was just the state of anger. But she pushed me. And she said, well, you're not angry at God, are you? And I thought, that's it. That's it, exactly. I'm angry at God. I am furious at God. To which she replied, you're not angry at good, are you? Now, I was angry at her. You see, by equating God with good, she was pushing me. She was pushing me to think. Which is not something that I had been particularly doing up to that point. I'd been riding this roller coaster of feeling. The ups and downs of feeling. But really thinking, giving consideration to what I understood of God, what I was giving consent to about God, or about good. There was no doubt I was angry. I was angry at death. I was angry at loss. I was angry at fear. I was so tired of being afraid. But angry at good? Could I say I was angry at good? No. I craved good. I just needed to get a better sense of the nature of God as good. You know, I'd fallen into a fairly common trap when my husband passed on of considering God from a way too human sense. Of some man on a throne distant from his creation. Obviously on vacation on the day that I needed him. Distributing answers to this prayer or to that prayer. But some know this man-like figure that seems so arbitrary. And I had lost my grip on what Christian science teaches about the true nature of God as the principle of good that is always present with us. Well, after I got off of the phone and went through this mental wrestling realizing what my great need was it plunged me into a renewed study of Mary Baker Eddy's book. I had read Science and Health many, many times to understand the Bible better. It is a key. It gives a key to the Scriptures. It unlocks the Scriptures and gives you access to the true sense of God and how to apply that in daily life. But this time when I picked up this book I read it to find God, to grow my understanding, deepen my understanding of God something that I had lost through this experience. Now you're going to see me refer to my brown leather copy of the exact same book. Just this one holds up better in a suitcase. So this is the one I'll refer to. But it's the exact same book as the one that I'm holding here and this copy will be available in the back after this talk for anyone who doesn't have one. All right. So I started at the beginning the first chapter of Science and Health is titled Prayer. And it jumps right in to the true nature of God as love. Love. Not just a loving aspect. God with a loving side because that God can have a hurtful side as well. No. Divine love itself is God. And Science and Health says that God is love. It takes that straight from Scripture. Every page of Science and Health draws its authority from Scripture. So as we find in 1 John, God is love. Can we ask him to be more? Little further, God is love. More than this we cannot ask. Higher we cannot look. Farther we cannot go. And then the chapter develops what that love is. Impartial. Available to everyone all the time. Without conditions. No, I'll love you this much if or I'll give you this much when. No. The love that is God is not conditional. It's not arbitrary. It's universal. It's unlimited. And it's freely expressed. Love can only love. Me. My husband. All of us. Love can only love. I was beginning as my sense of love was growing. I was losing a sense of a here and a there. Me here. My husband there. Like we were in some great distant and divided creation. But saw that love is the only reality. That we all exist in love. Then in love there is no here. There is no there. And I saw that in this great and infinite love there is no death. There's no connection between love and death. Love is life. Life is all. Life does not know death. There's no ending point to divine life. Just like light can't know darkness, life can't know death. There's a beautiful passage that helped me tremendously. This is in Scripture, in the book of Isaiah where we read, Zion said, the Lord hath forsaken me and my Lord hath forgotten me. Boy could I relate to that. That's exactly where I started in this story, isn't it? But the story goes on. The account goes on. The voice of love enters in and explains God's true nature. Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yay! They may forget. Yet will I not forget the behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands. Look at your palm. Look at your palm. In fact, take your palm, take your hand, and cup it for me. Cup it like you're holding a little water. You have to do this because I'm going to give you something and if you don't do it you can't catch it. So get your cup of water here, your little water in there. Now I'm going to throw you a baby pee. I want you to take your pee, take your baby pee and drop it in there and let it roll right to the bottom where it would naturally go. Okay? Now put your fingers over your pee. Now squeeze. Squeeze, really. Squeeze. Do you see? You can't crush your pee. You can't crush your pee. That spot, that tender little spot where your pee went, that little spot is where we're all graven in divine love's hand, safe in that uncrushable place in divine love. What I love about Isaiah is that it's very honest. It's very honest about the human experience. A human sense of love may fail. Things happen in human experience where love seems to fail. Can a woman forget her sucking child? I forgot my daughter at school one day. I was supposed to pick her up and I forgot her. Now when I remembered, I felt terrible. I felt awful. And the entire time that I was racing to get over to the school to pick her up, I was praying. I was turning wholeheartedly to this fact that divine love never loses sight of its creation. That love has us graven in that precious place in the palm. So I was comforted by the awareness that she was safe and she was secure and she was fine. And when I picked her up, she was mad. But she was fine. She was well. She was safe. The human sense of love may fail. But the divine does not. Love only knows how to love. Always love In fact, God's love is always present for us. We can't escape it. Even if we've closed our eyes to it, even if we feel we've we've completely lost contact with love, that love is still embracing us. It was love that broke through my mental darkness and pushed me just that little bit to realize that I needed to turn towards and get a bigger sense of God. I needed to find God in order to find healing. And in fact, that is exactly what happened. As I continued studying, praying, expanding my God vocabulary, enlarging my sense of God, I found that comfort and healing, in fact, the grief came to a full and complete stop. Not only did I know that I was safe and secure in love, in life, and that my future and my joy and my security was safe in God, I knew that His was as well. I knew that He was loved because I loved Him. And in love, that love is always felt. I knew that I was loved. I knew that He loved me, reflecting God's love in all of us. That healing of grief, as exceptional and wonderful as it is, is not exceptional in the sense that I'm the only one who's experienced it. These kinds of healings have happened many, many, many times over, of emotional health, relational health, being restored through finding a bigger sense of God. Since the publication of science and health, many have found healing through growing that understanding of what God is and proving it in their daily life. I think sometimes finding God is a question of vocabulary. In science and health, there's a chapter entitled The Glossary. It's an actual glossary of Bible terms that are commonly used in the Bible that take you to a spiritual definition. Christ Jesus knew the Scriptures. He understood that an understanding of Scripture was foundational to health. It was foundational to being able to help others and heal others. So in Christian science, an understanding of Scripture is really essential to plumbing those laws of God and being able to apply them in daily life. Well, in The Glossary, there's a wonderful definition of God taken straight from Scripture. I'll give it to you here. God, the great I am, the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal. Principle, mind, soul, spirit, life, truth, love, all-substance, intelligence. Each one of those words, each one of those concepts is discussed in one way or another from Genesis to Revelation as you're reading the Bible. Now, that's not to say that there's not a lot of misconceptions about the nature of God. A lot of that man-on-the-throne kind of sense, but healing doesn't come from the misconceptions of God. Those who were healers understood God to be principle, understood God's nature as love. And what I love about that definition is it gives wonderful jump-off point, so many jump-off points into putting your arms around God, growing your God vocabulary and having a bigger sense. I think the facts of God are a lot like the facts of math. Can you really know too much math? Isn't it true that the more you do know, the further you can go with your calculations? Think of a little boy who's learned his multiplication tables all the way up to the nines. I mean, all the way through the nines. Do you remember learning your nines and what a big deal that was? 9 times 9 is 81. I mean, you're at the peak, the absolute peak of intelligence when you know that. Now, do you think that little boy is going to be afraid of a 9 times 9 kind of problem? Because he has an 81 in his pocket and he is not afraid to use it. In fact, when a kid learned his nines, isn't he just aching for someone to ask him, what is 9 times 9, James? What is 9 times 9? He wants to use his 81. He's full of answers. He's not full of fear or full of questions. He has answers. Well, the facts of God work the same way. The more you know, the more you understand, the further you go in expanding your God vocabulary, the more answers you have, ready access to answers when any kind of question comes up. The facts of God are discernible by anyone. I don't want anyone in here after this lecture to say, well, you know, I've always been bad at math. There's usually one in every crowd. But whether it's the facts of God or the facts of math, we all have an innate sense that allows us to discover the facts, allows us to know what's true. It's called spiritual sense. Mary Baker-Eddie defines spiritual sense as a conscious, constant capacity to understand God. And it's something that we all have. Everyone has spiritual sense. Everyone has a capacity to know what is true. I'm going to give you an example. I was once asked to address an annual meeting of atheists. This was back when I lived in New Jersey, on the subject of Christian science. Exactly. That's exactly what I thought. Are you kidding me? What am I supposed to talk about? I'm a one-subject girl. All I know to talk about is my experience with God. What could I possibly talk about? Well, they wanted to know about Christian science, so I went in unabashed and talked about God. Now, I understood that the God vocabulary they were familiar with had a lot of connotations, so we had to do a lot of defining of terms. I talked about principle, a universal divine principle or law that upholds all good. We talked about love, the infinite nature of love, and the power of love to transform lives. We talked about spirit, spirit as the true substance of life, and these were all terms that they were very comfortable talking about. In fact, the sense of God that the majority of atheists reject, we were very much on the same page, and what I found was a very developed spiritual sense, a natural, awake, conscious, constant capacity to know what is good. In fact, what I saw was the same universal desire we all have to experience good. It was a wonderful, wonderful occasion. Spiritual sense, we all have it. And yet, we don't all exercise it, do we? We all have this capacity, we don't necessarily all use our spiritual sense, good spiritual sense. Why? Well, this was a question that Christ Jesus addressed. He understood that we're often distracted. Pulled, you might say, by what I like to call Eat, Drink, Clothing Syndrome. Pull and attraction to just a material sense of life. What am I going to eat? What am I going to wear? What am I going to drink? What am I going to put on? Who am I? All focused on a material sense. This material sense sometimes takes the form of a belief that life is exclusively physical, that that's all there is to it. That in fact, life is just some flash of consciousness between birth and death. Then intelligence is limited. That we all have a little piece of the intelligence pie, but not much. That good is fragmented, divided up in bits and pieces with haves and have-nots. And this material sense of life acts like a drag, like an anchor, tugging, tugging, pulling, pulling, away from that natural spiritual sense that we all have that is seeking, reaching for freedom from these limited beliefs. Now Jesus understood that this was an issue and he gave counsel in the Sermon on the Mount. That beautiful compilation of teachings for healers. Teachings in Matthew chapter 5, 6 and 7 that prepare a healer, prepare their life to be a healer, and that sends them out with instruction on how to do it. Listen to this. Take no thought for your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor yet for your body what you shall put on, is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment, but seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. I'd like you to listen to Eugene Peterson's take on Jesus' words in his paraphrase called The Message. I love this because it beautifully contrasts that material sense drag with God's spiritual sense, our God-given spiritual sense. Here's what Mr. Peterson writes. You can't worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you'll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach and more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. People who don't know God and the way he works fuss over these things. But you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God reality. God initiative. God provisions. You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now. And the rest of that sermon on the Mount takes you right there. Shows you how to exercise that spiritual sense that takes you further and deeper into an understanding of God and your relation to God as his perfect, healthy creation. When... Gosh, what year was this? It was 2001. In 2001, I had an experience that required me to go deeper and further than I had ever gone before in the subject of finding God. A lump was discovered in one of my breasts. Now in my family, breast cancer had been making the rounds. My mother had lost one breast to a mastectomy. My aunt, two breasts, and she passed on shortly after. When this was discovered, I made a choice and it may not sound like a particularly conventional choice as far as care, but it was the choice that I made for me based on my experience. I decided to rely on God through prayer as taught in Christian science to find healing. And I'll explain to you why. First of all, I'd had a lot of experience with healing prayer. I'd been a practitioner of Christian science for a number of years, helped myself, my family, others find healing through prayer. And had myself been healed of a life-threatening case of pneumonia, broken bones. I had substantial experience through healing prayer. But that wasn't it. My reason for choosing spiritual means was my daughter. You see, the fear of cancer and the spread of cancer, it just seemed rampant in my family. And here I had a 14-year-old daughter at home. I could not see how physically removing a lump from my body just through physical means was going to prevent this fear from spreading to her. It seemed to me that spiritual means were the only way to thoroughly obliterate this claim, not only from me, but from my family. And so out of love for my daughter, I had Christian science treatment. I gave myself Christian science treatment through prayer every day. That was part of my health regime. I studied, I read the Bible, I read science and health, but I didn't just read all the time. I spent a lot of time praying for myself. But I didn't pray all the time. Sometimes I just sat and thought deep thoughts. Sometimes I just, I call it white wall time, where I just sat and let God talk to me. I was really looking for a bigger sense of God. Interestingly enough, disease and the symptoms of disease were not the subject of my prayer. Finding God. A bigger sense of spiritual reality. Finding what it meant for me to truly be as Genesis 1 describes us, God's image and likeness. That was my subject. And I was voracious. My appetite for spiritual subjects was voracious. There were times during this experience, during this regime, when I would call on a colleague, another Christian science practitioner to pray with me and to pray for me. And those were the times that would come up occasionally when I was dealing with a lot of fear myself and or discouragement. And I would call on a colleague to come in and help. When I wasn't feeling 100% clear about how to pray for myself. And they were such precious times. In fact, I can remember such a turning point when fear completely left me. My friend had encouraged me to turn to Psalm 46 where it says be still and know that I am God. When I turned to that being still and know that I am God what I found was I immediately went to that precious place I saw myself in that spiritual stillness graven in life, permanent in love in that safe and uncrushable place. And it was such a comfort to know the depth of God's love for me that it took the fear away. Discouragement was one that was quite a challenge because this problem, the symptoms persisted and seemed worse at certain points. Discouragement was a tough one and I called on a friend to pray that too. And I can remember if you can believe it, it was the Book of Habakkuk that turned me around. I know who reads Habakkuk, right? Who even knows who Habakkuk is, right? He's one of the prophets, he's in there. I had not given a whole lot of consideration to Habakkuk up until this point but Habakkuk is it's a fun book to read. He's a real character. The first couple of chapters is a lot of whiny fussy, woe is this and woe is that and woe is the other thing. I mean, and isn't that what Discouragement does to us? It takes us into the woe, woe, woe of symptoms, one symptom after the other and there's a lot of that in Habakkuk. But there's a beautiful point where there's this interruption to the whole whiny fussy thing and that is the last verse of the second chapter that says but and watch your buts in the Bible. Anything that follows a but is usually very helpful information but the Lord is in his holy temple let all the earth keep silence before him with such a beautiful interruption to the woe is me symptom rehearsing of Discouragement that would go on is to remember but God is your subject God is in his holy temple and you know what I threw myself in that temple the temple of gratitude the temple of good I look for every evidence of good every evidence of love every evidence of life that I could find around me as proof of God's presence with me and in that temple of gratitude it just as that temple became more and more and more full of evidence and proofs of God's care it pushed that Discouragement out in a permanent way so much so that when the fear and the Discouragement were gone the Bible was an entirely different book to me I was able to look to read it and it was it was like it was written in black and white where I was able to separate the misconceptions about God in his creation and see exclusively the truth what God really is and what he does for us and I found in that scripture reading that God is mind intelligent mind and that from this intelligence God could not, would not and did not create a stupid fallible creation out of dysfunctional dust that's destined to die in one form or another I saw that death is no part of mind no part of intelligence that the human perception of what we call death is actually simply a limited perspective of the eternal life the continued experience of the one that we're believing has gone on I lost all fear of death I saw that the Adam and Eve story of dysfunctional relationships and dysfunctional beings had no part of my experience I was not Eve's daughter and I could see that no one was no one is Eve's child in that study as things began to really clarify and separate I saw that God is spirit and that spirit is the substance of all real being of all real life by substance I mean the very substance that we're made of is spirit so this God that is spirit would not, could not and did not create life out of out of material substance something that is not permanent and the moment it appears it's on the way out that man is not controlled by DNA pre-programmed to ease or to death but that spirit constantly controls maintains creation and the final big aha for me was just a bigger sense once more of God as love true love and finding God as love washed from me innumerable hurts innumerable thoughts of betrayal of it allowed me to forgive it allowed me to forgive myself of things that I had held onto I found that in God's love that God in creating us with love through love creates us only to be loving that we're not linked to each other through disease or through sensuality or through or through hatred there's no connection there's no hateful connection in man we're linked through love it's the only way that we're connected this regime of prayer study renewal growing my understanding of God went from March 2001 all the way through until October of that year of 2001 I awakened one morning and the symptoms were completely gone I have been free of all traces of that disease since that time without the fear or even the hint suggestion of a return of those conditions and not only that since 2001 there's not been a single diagnosis of breast cancer in our family or our extended family Mary Baker Eddy once wrote that the talent and genius of the centuries have wrongly reckoned they have not base their conclusions on the simple life and teachings of Jesus for the solutions to the perplexing problems of human existence the life and teachings of Jesus are the basis of Christian science everything that Christian science teaches everything that Mary Baker Eddy discovered involved bringing what Jesus knew to general practice you know she was a tremendous healer she was a writer and a teacher of others but a tremendous healer think of all those bright lights of healers that we've had throughout history I was thinking of this the other day something that to me really sets her apart from so many that had gone before her you know with Christ Jesus he was a healer among other healers there were other healers in his day that were going out and helping people but what set him apart in human history and has made his teachings last as long as they have was his own experience of crucifixion resurrection ascension putting out there the fact that there is no matter that death for all of its scary appearances is not real and that's transformed the world well Mary Baker Eddy discovered this she was good at applying this science in her own life and helping her small circle but her vision was much greater than that she didn't strive to be a personal healer her commitment was to humanity to show humanity what their potential was to show us all that this universal science belongs to everyone not to one person in a limited period but that this is the it's the new world order it is the law that can lift everyone out of disease and sin her greatest heart's desire was that we discover in ourselves this capacity to heal this understanding of God that heals her greatest heart's desire was that you and I and everyone be healed and discover that we ourselves are healers and I think I'll stop right there thank you