Dear Broadview Family:
On the Fourth of July, I called a friend. “What’s freedom?” I asked. She thought a moment, then told me a story:
I went out at dusk to find our dog, stepped in a hole in the neighbor’s pasture, and came back limping, assuring myself that there are no accidents. Still, the pain got worse. Soon I couldn’t walk, and I certainly couldn’t sleep. I began wondering how to get some crutches — then I beat back that thought with the Scientific Statement of Being1, plus “In him we live and move and have our being….”2 Finally, I slept. The next morning, I walked all the way across the room before I remembered what had happened. The pain was completely gone.
“That’s freedom,” my friend concluded. But she never would have experienced such a quick healing, she added, if it weren’t for an earlier healing that took much longer:
I had a horse accident, and my elbow seemed so badly dislocated that I asked a doctor to set it. The ligaments around the joint were all torn out, he said, so my arm would be bent forever. When I got home, I removed the cast and started calling a practitioner. But my arm stayed bent, and lifeless. To move it, I had to lift it with my other hand. Then I really got to work metaphysically. The thought that meant the most to me was: movement is my divine right.
Eventually, I had the full use of my arm, with no permanent bend. Still, I wasn’t sure it was a real healing. Maybe I should credit the doctor, or the passage of time. Then I met a physical therapist at a party. Curious about the story, he ran my arm through a few tests. “I’ve never seen a recovery like this,” he marveled, “except in a child two or three years old.”
Why was one healing so quick and the other so slow? “The first time,” my friend said, “I didn’t trust that I could heal. The second time, I did — remembering the other healing.”
As I thought about my friend’s stories, something I’d once heard came back to me, from Broadview’s dear friend Lona Ingwerson:
Jesus said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I used to labor with that when I was a kid. What truth? I didn’t know what “the truth” was. Then I found it in Genesis 1: it’s the truth that you’re free already.
Wow. Let’s celebrate how quick and natural healing is when we that know we’re free already. That’s worth a whole sky-full of fireworks!
Sending a big, bright burst of love,
Marivic Bay Mabanag
Executive Director
1 Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 468.
2 Acts 17:28 (KJV).