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As a teen struggling with a view of God as punishing and blessing, I had two prevailing thoughts about God: anger and fear. When I was introduced to Christian Science, I did not expect to find solutions to those struggles in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures , but I was intrigued by the ideas that the book was a key to understanding the Bible (which I had grown up reading) and that it explained a divine Science of healing. It seemed reasonable to me that if something is actually a science, then any honest student can learn the rules, apply them, and find predictable results.

I came into Christian Science as an adult and found it to be just what I’d been searching for -- Mrs. Eddy’s writings described so perfectly something I’d always known deep inside.

My love for Christian Science healing began as a young teenager. My mother and grandmother were healed of chronic ailments, and I was permanently healed of migraine headaches by reading Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.

My family has practiced Christian Science for over 100 years.  My great-grandmother was healed of tuberculosis in Biloxi, Mississippi. My paternal grandmother was healed of a heart condition supposed to be fatal. I’ve wanted to help, save and heal people through Christ and Christian Science since I was a child. In elementary school, I shared Christian Science with others and had significant healings on my own. At 12, I united with The Mother Church and a branch church, writing my first testimony for publication. Christian Science has always been a rock of salvation and healing for me. Throughout high school and college, I actively worked to explain the Christ, Truth, to others in language they could understand, and prayed for others when they asked.

Attending Christian Science Sunday School as a child, I loved what I learned there of God—He’s everywhere, always Love, and All. But going out into the “cold, cruel world,” I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing with a God who is Love. Putting my Bible and Science and Health on the shelf, I forged ahead, just trying to live a moral, meaningful life. I married, had children, was happy, but missing was a depth to life.  Science and Health beckoned to me. Opening it, I saw my grandmother’s note inside: “Judith Ann—Read this.  You owe it to yourself.” I did, for the first time. When I came to “The calm, strong currents of true spirituality.

As a child, I was told that my great-great-great grandmother became a Christian Science practitioner after she was healed while reading Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. However, I certainly remember my grandfather as a Christian Science practitioner whom I adored and whom I could always ask for help.

My parents’ commitment to world peace and humanitarian causes, and their love for Christian Science, set the tone for my childhood, and early instilled in me a respect for all peoples. Added to this, growing up in three countries with four languages helped to enlarge my love for this diverse universe. I was educated in Switzerland, Argentina, and Washington, DC.

I learned of Christian Science in my middle teens. Our family came to it through a “miraculous” healing of a relative. I tested it, and was amazed at the consistent results. The Science proved to be genuinely scientific. Its practice became the basis of my studies and early career. That career took some radically different zigs and zags. From research director at an international relations and mediation institute in Italy, to labor organizer in New England, to foundation director, to university professor, to peace and civil rights activist, to founding an anti-racism project which was the basis of the YWCA “Social Justice Award”. The focus, the common denominator of these careers, was solving problems.

In 1923 my grandfather was given a copy of Science and Health, and through reading it, healed his five-year-old son (my father) of terminal cancer and polio, whose case had been given up by five physicians. I felt a natural affinity for Christian Science as a young child, and early developed a desire to heal.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, defined it as “the law of God, the law of good . . . ” (Rudimental Divine Science, p. 1). In Christian Science, God is understood to be infinite Love, and so invariably good that a clear glimpse of this through prayer has power to heal, redeem, and restore anyone.