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Christian Science has been central to my life for as long as I can remember. As a result of reading the Christian Science textbook, my mother was healed of a life-long, incurable skin disease. Before my birth, my parents were told they could not have children, but through dedicated prayer my mother found she was expecting a child and I appeared on the scene. Two years later my brother joined the family also! As a child, love for God and healing were never far from my thought and during college the practicing of Christian Science became a natural part of my life. I married my wonderful husband, and in 1977, as a young mother with two small children, I went into the public practice of Christian Science. Years of happy family life followed, interwoven with an active public healing practice. In 1985 I became a Christian Science teacher--inspiring work which I have done for the last 25 years.

A career in spiritual healing—not even on my radar when I headed off to college! My love of numbers made accounting an attractive major, while international travels to France and Switzerland enriched my experience with a deepening global awareness. Marriage and family came before my degree, so I attended night school and worked in financial accounting for a railroad company, which was the parent of both a steel company and a trucking company.

A beautiful healing of my mother of an enlarged heart brought our family into Christian Science. I grew up in Texas and I’ve always been a seeker for Truth. But during my university studies in graphic arts, I had a challenging physical problem that impelled me to continually read Science and Health.

I was born in Italy and moved to Brazil with my family as a teenager. Ever since my childhood I had felt drawn to religion and spirituality even though my family was not very religious.  Brazil offered me the opportunity to pursue my spiritual search, and I was able to get better acquainted with the Bible, which I loved. Then in college I was introduced to Christian Science by the young man who later became my husband. I immediately felt it was the deep truth I was looking for.

Healing in Christian Science can never be compared to anything else here on earth. Christian Science indeed has enabled me to prove that "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of trouble." My early years were spent in Eastern Province of Kenya, with my parents and three brothers and five sisters.

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 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.

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.