A Heart Softened

I am so grateful for all I have learned in Plainfield about Mary Baker Eddy’s pure Christian Science, and for how I have been healed and blessed and been thoroughly changed by all that I have experienced here.

When I was young, due to the circumstances I found myself in, I increasingly became more guarded and withdrawn. Eventually, this turned into a real hardness of my heart, and a deep apathy toward my fellow man. I foolishly thought that closing off my emotions made me stronger, but in the end I realized a simple fact: How strong could I actually be, if I could neither cry when the situation called for it, nor be there both physically and emotionally for others when they needed it.

I began to see how short-sighted my approach to protecting myself was when my first child was born, and I realized that the way I was living was both unhealthy and unworthy of passing on to a child. So I began to work to soften my hard heart, but without God in my life it felt all but impossible. The most I could manage was a personal sense of love for my immediate family, but there still was no love for others. It felt like there were only three or four people I was capable of loving.

So when I came to Plainfield, and started working with a practitioner here, I was quite grateful I was given an opportunity to see from her example what a fully functioning heart looked like. That example included both the ability to be loving and kind to all people everywhere, but also the ability to have firm boundaries that no one could cross. Eventually I realized it was an example of divine Love in action, where “Love is reflected in love” (S&H, p. 16) as Mrs. Eddy said. With that example, over the course of many years here, there was much “labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love” (S&H, p. 242) all the emotional issues I had and that old human sense of protecting myself which never did me any good at all, and I am so grateful to say that I have been fully healed.

And, even though my kids are adults now, I have still been given opportunities to show them what I have learned here about being loving while also having boundaries, so for that and many, many other reasons I am so grateful for all I have been taught in this church, and for how it has proven to me without a doubt that Christian Science works, and that it is exactly what the world needs to solve every issue. It is a constant blessing to be a part of this church.