I’ve read lots of stories in the Christian Science Sentinel about people who have experienced instantaneous healing of broken bones. Quite often, they’ll describe the strange sensation of feeling a bone painlessly set itself.
That’s always struck me as a kind of weird thing to have happen. How surreal would it be to feel your bones moving around inside your body? Something about the whole thing seemed vaguely creepy, like listening to the dentist work on your teeth while your jaw is full of Novocain.
A couple of weekends ago, I was cutting boards for my deck project when I managed to drop a 12-foot pressure-treated 4×4 directly onto my instep … from waist height … in such a way that it came down corner first.
The pain was immediate — and blinding — and I had the sense that I had basically crushed my instep, but I countered that claim instantly with a line from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:
I reasoned that what I was doing was right action, undertaken with right motives, and there was no way God would allow me to suffer as a result of such activity.
The pain lessened dramatically, and I was able to continue my work, although I had the sense that my foot was swelling, and I had to fight the temptation to look at it. Each time it would start to hurt or I would start to get scared of what it might be doing, I would think about what this particular error was trying to tell me.
God constantly protects His children, so in order for my foot to be broken, something would have had to separate me from God, I realized, or else God, divine Principle, would have had to stop working long enough to allow an injustice to take place. Neither of those scenarios made any sense, and I realized this injury — and the accident that seemed to cause it — must be nothing more than illusion.
I discovered a few minutes later that I needed something in the house, and I found that I was able to stand up and walk inside to get it without significant pain.
A few hours later, I had the strange sensation that the bones in the top of my foot were moving around in directions they probably shouldn’t. It didn’t hurt, but it was weird and a bit unnerving, and I wound up calling a practitioner to help keep my fear in check.
It occurred to me the next day that the strange feeling I’d experienced the night before was probably the same thing people are always talking about in the Sentinel. The blow was sharp enough, the board heavy enough, and the initial pain intense enough that it seemed very likely I’d broken several bones in my instep. Yet the swelling, discoloration, and soreness that one would expect to go on for days after such an injury never materialized, and by the time I got up the next morning, I was able to put on my favorite shoes (a cute pair of four-inch platform heels) and walk across the church parking lot in them without any pain at all.
I’m learning not to be amazed by healings like this, but I still think they’re awfully cool when they happen.
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 