“The way of salvation”

While I was being treated in Christian Science, I asked the practitioner one day why I was not yet healed. The reply was, “You are like a person in a dark room who tries to drive out the darkness with a club instead of letting in the light.”

I returned home feeling discouraged and almost hopeless. I had given up an operation,—which the doctors hoped might bring me relief but which promised no cure,—to try Christian Science treatment. For weeks I had been faithfully reading the Bible and Science and Health and watching each day for the physical healing. That night I opened my Bible and turned the leaves listlessly, for I felt there was no hope for me, here or anywhere else. Suddenly these words from the third chapter of Proverbs caught my eye, and through my tears I read them again and again, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” A great sense of peace came to me and a ray of light penetrated the darkness. I saw that my own understanding had been that sickness sin, and sorrow were true, and I had been leaning unto that understanding all my life. If God is All-in-all, as we are told in the Bible and in Science and Health, surely I could trust Him. I did turn to Him, and rested in Him, and in a short time the physical trouble entirely disappeared.

Many times since then, when there have been problems to solve and when the darkness has seemed impenetrable, I have suddenly realized that I have been using the club to error, and leaning into my “own understanding.” Then I have turned to God, to ever-present Love, and the darkness has disappeared, and there has been no problem to solve. Surely we should try each day to get a fuller realization of the meaning of “ever-present.” The divine light is always shining, and in the “Father of lights” is “no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”