by Christian K. - The Christian Science Journal, June, 2007
A few months after the school year started at my boarding school, I had an ear problem. One night I noticed a buzzing of some sort in my left ear when I went to sleep. It had been hurting for a while whenever I was talking, running, wrestling, and even sleeping, but I mostly ignored it. That night the noise in my ear got annoying.
The next morning I had to go to a clinic to get a skin condition checked out so I’d be allowed to wrestle in a school tournament that afternoon. Before every tournament, you weigh in, and then you go over to a guy who checks out your skin. At a tournament a couple of days earlier, the officials told me I couldn’t wrestle because they thought I had some kind of rash. When I went to the waiting room at the doctor’s office, I saw a poster about ear infections tacked up on the wall. It said some ear problems start with buzzing in the ear, and then the ear gets swollen to the point where the ear drum inflates. According to the poster, eventually, this could cause deafness. I got worried. I thought I’d tell the doctor about my ear, but then I decided not to. I didn’t really know what was going on, but I knew I wanted to pray about it. I’ve had a lot of healings using Christian Science, so I felt I could handle this through prayer. For example, when I was in junior high school, I had plantar warts all over the bottom of one of my feet, and warts on both of my hands. On the way home from church one night, my mom, my sister, and I started praying about it, and all the warts dissolved in a few days.
Back in the doctor’s waiting room, I could feel the inside of my ear start to inflate, just like the poster said. Then I got really afraid about what was going to happen to me if I lost my hearing. At the doctor’s, I found out that the rash wasn’t anything serious or contagious, and the doctor cleared me to wrestle that day. But after that, the problem with my ear got worse.
One night I decided to sit at my bedroom desk and pray about things for a couple of hours. I wanted to know the truth about the situation. What I mean is, I thought about how I was made in God’s image. I also thought about this verse from this hymn:
Everlasting arms of Love
Are beneath, around, above;
God it is who bears us on,
His the arm we lean upon.
(Christian Science Hymnal, No. 53)
God is always there to defend you when you are down, or to catch you when you are falling. Nothing can ever hurt God because He is divine Spirit. How could a disease harm something spiritual—something so perfect and omnipotent? It can’t. And because I am God’s image, a disease or physical flaw can’t hurt me either. This one thought helped to heal the fear that had become planted in my mind. I realized that fear in your thought is like a weed in your garden—you have to dig out the weed and remove it. Once you pull up the roots, the weed doesn’t come back. So I just got quiet and dug as deeply as I could to the truth of who I am as God’s reflection. I knew that God is the Creator of every living thing and that God’s creation—including me—is perfect.
A couple of days after that session of praying, I felt fine. And I’ve had no problems with my ear since then. I’ve had a lot of healings at boarding school this past year, but that’s one that I’ll always remember.