My healing of an eye injury

When I was sixteen years old, my family moved about thirty miles away from our previous residence. To visit my old friends on the weekend, I would hitchhike.

One day about halfway through my journey two boys stopped and told me I could not hitchhike in their town. I told them both to get lost. One of them pushed me, and I pushed him back. We started to wrestle and I got one boy pinned down. But the other boy pulled me off his friend and then suddenly one of them kicked me right in the eye.

A storekeeper who was watching us came out and broke us up. He asked me if I wanted a ride to a doctor. Instead, I asked him to phone my aunt to pick me up.

My aunt was in the fulltime practice of Christian Science healing. All my life, I had used Christian Science as a means of healing. I was always healed when I called her to pray for me. Why should this time be any different? I thought to myself.

When my aunt picked me up, she, too, asked me whether I wished to visit the doctor or use the prayer of Christian Science. I told her, Christian Science. Okay, she said, we must radically turn our thought to God; you may pray with me now. And we did pray. She gave me a homework assignment to read and study this passage from Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy: “When Jesus declares that ‘the light of the body is the eye,’ he certainly means that light depends upon Mind, not upon the complex humors, lenses, muscles, the iris and pupil, constituting the visual organism.”(393:25-28)

In Science and Health, Mind is a synonym for the omnipotent God. I realized that if God, Mind, gave me light, then nothing could take it away. I had complete confidence that God would heal me. Within a few days the black eye and all the evidence of the injury were completely healed.

My aunt then insisted that we go to a local doctor to confirm the healing. In his examination, the physician said, Young man, you are lucky that you can see. You were kicked right near the pupil and there is evidence you had an injury. However, your eye is just fine now, like nothing ever happened.

I am grateful for this healing. This experience was an opportunity to learn more obedience, since hitchhiking was against the law where I was doing it. I never hitchhiked again.