“A very present help in trouble...”
One fall when my husband was out-of-town, I decided to turn floodlights on in the back yard and do some raking. After I went inside, I had difficulty removing a heavy cable knit sweater, but with one hard yank, I managed to get it off. In so doing, I realized that I had pulled my eyelids up and then felt that something was in one eye. I went to the bathroom nearby and looked in the mirror. I saw the end of a piece of 16 gauge wire against the dark iris of the eye. I gently touched the foreign object and found it was sharp and obviously embedded. The end was so close to the surface of the eye that I knew I could not get it out with tweezers.
I can honestly say that although I knew I could not do anything humanly to remove the little piece of wire, I had found during some twenty years of being a student of Christian Science that God is indeed, “a very present help in time of trouble” (Psalms 91); therefore, I was not anxious because that promise had been proven many times in my experience. Also, earlier in the day I had read an article by Adam Dickey, an early student of Christian Science, entitled “God’s Law of Adjustment.” The major premise of this article is that as God is infinite and all-powerful, His righteous laws are everywhere present. Consequently, if we turn to those laws and apply them to a particular challenge, they will act as a law of adjustment to any situation no matter how impossible it would seem to the material senses.
Because blinking was uncomfortable, I went to bed to keep my eyes closed and pray. Like the Psalmist, I had learned to put my trust under “the shadow of His wings,” so it was natural to turn to my Father for help. I knew that God is the only I AM and that man is made in God’s image and likeness, His reflection, as Genesis 1 maintains. Many “angel messages” came to me from Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Christian Science textbook by Mary Baker Eddy, which has much to say about sight, seeing, vision, perception, etc. One definition of God from the textbook states that God is “all-seeing”; in fact, all the faculties belong to God, Spirit and they are eternal, maintained by God, not dependent on material elements.
Examples of Christ Jesus’ healings of blindness came to thought as well as his words, “Having eyes, see ye not?” and “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” Clearly his teachings were based on a spiritual sense of sight instead of a material one. I thought of another definition of God as Mind and affirmed that I did, indeed, “live, and move, and have (my) being” in this Mind. In pondering this wonderful fact, I realized that it would be impossible for something foreign to enter this infinitude of God’s goodness and perfection. With that thought I felt at peace and went to sleep. The next morning I got up, started my day and soon realized that there was no problem with my eye.
Reflecting later on this healing, two statements from Mrs. Eddy’s writings came to mind; “A spiritual idea has not a single element of error and this truth removes properly whatever is offensive” (Science and Health p.463) and “…if you fall asleep, actually conscious of the truth of Christian Science,—namely that man’s harmony can no more be invaded than the rhythm of the universe,—you cannot awake in fear or suffering of any sort.” (Retrospection and Introspection p.61) This experience that happened over twenty-five years ago furnished further proof that God is indeed, “a very present help in trouble.”
Suzanne Stockfisch
Maryville, Tennessee