by Lauren Garcia - The Christian Science Journal, May 2006
THUD.
It was the sound of our tackle football game. Me hitting the ground. The guy who took me down was big—a lot bigger than I am. And when I tried to get up, well, it wasn’t really happening.
Although I didn’t end up having it X-rayed or anything, from the looks of it, I’m pretty sure that my ankle was severely injured. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but the worst part was that I had a soccer tournament to go to in four days. And in that first moment after getting tackled, I did wonder if I’d be walking in four days—let alone playing in an intense, two-games-a-day tournament.
But then I started to think about God, and I went back to some ideas that have helped me and healed me in the past. Growing up as a Christian Scientist, I’ve learned that God created me in His image and likeness.1 So in order to understand who I really am—the way He made me—all I need to do is think about who and what God is.
This is what I knew about God: God could never be sick or hurt or in a bad situation. God is Spirit, and you can’t break Spirit or injure Spirit. The goodness and wholeness of Spirit doesn’t change. After all, what could be bigger, or more powerful, than omnipotent Spirit?
Being God’s image and likeness, then, means I express that same wholeness. Whatever is true about Spirit is true about me. So if Spirit couldn’t be hurt or broken, then there was no way I could be, either.
When I got home, I called a Christian Science practitioner for help, and my mom began praying for me, too. We talked about how I’m a spiritual idea—the likeness of Spirit, as I’d been thinking about—and so materiality can’t have anything to do with me. It doesn’t matter what I’m seeing with my eyes. The view that counts is Spirit’s view, and that view doesn’t change. I knew God was seeing me as His perfect reflection right then.
I continued to pray with these ideas for the next couple of days, and the practitioner and my mom kept praying for me, too. By the time the soccer tournament rolled around, my ankle still didn’t look totally normal, but I could move completely freely.
It did seem like I had a choice to make in that moment, and this was it: I could either make the decision that I hadn’t been healed because that ankle still didn’t look like the other one. Or I could return to what I’d been knowing all along—that I was already whole and uninjured and that nothing could inhibit my expression of God.
More than anything, I just wanted to look away from any remaining evidence of the injury, focus on what was spiritually true, and go forward with that. And that’s what I did. We headed out for the tournament with the confidence that I would be able to play without any trouble.
And I was able to—every minute of every game! Nobody knew that anything was amiss—not even my coach—because my play wasn’t affected in the least. At halftime during some of the games I talked to the practitioner, who shared more ideas about why I could expect only continued progress. And I wasn’t in pain or anything. I just really felt God impelling me forward.
I played a great tournament that weekend, and not long after I got back, I realized that my ankle was completely normal. I didn’t have to miss any training sessions in the aftermath of the injury, and I’ve gone on to play four years of varsity soccer and a year of college soccer with no problems at all.
This healing taught me the truth of what Mary Baker Eddy wrote in Science and Health:
Resist evil—error of every sort—and it will flee from you.
When I stuck with Truth, error didn’t have a leg to stand on. I know that’s what brought me complete freedom.1 See Gen. 1:26. 2 Science and Health, p. 406.