Shouldn’t you be home in bed?

“Why are you here?! You should be at home in bed.”
“But I’m fine. I want to do the play.”

“Two days ago we sent you home with an ear infection and a 104.7 temperature! There’s no way you are fine.”
“I am though. See, no fever, no infection. I’m good.”
“I don’t get it. What did the doctor do?”
“Nothing. I didn’t go to a doctor.”
“Then what? People don’t just get over something like that over night.”
“We prayed. I’m a Christian Scientist, and we prayed. I was better yesterday, but my mom said people might feel uncomfortable if I went to school. Today I had to beg to come because of the play. I want to do the play.”
“Well, you’re here, and you seem OK. So I guess you can. But I just don’t get it.”

That’s about how that conversation went.

I was in the fifth grade, had one of the leads in a little Thanksgiving play, and two days before I’d been sent home from school looking and feeling very sick. People seemed so worried about me. I didn’t know what it meant to have such a high fever so I wasn’t afraid. My parents were wonderful, very loving and attentive. They made sure I was taken care of in the best way.

But where I grew up—outside of our household—prayer was what people did when there seemed to be no other hope. It was definitely not common for people to turn to God first and in lieu of all other options.

So when I showed up just 2 days later—well, happy, and ready to participate in the play—people had a hard time understanding how that could be. They had expected me to be out for at least the rest of the week.  But to me it was normal. I’d been raised to know that God had made me and had made sure I was good in every way. So illness could be rejected as no part of me, literally having no power of its own. That meant that with the right understanding of my relationship to God, I could have the right understanding of me as healthy and happy.

There was never a time in my growing up years (or since) that this perspective has been wrong. Healing and health were natural in my home. We definitely had hard things to deal with (like this ear infection and other problems), but my parents were never afraid. They had such a sense of confidence in the spiritually scientific approach Christian Science gave them that we generally had quick healings. And anything that took a little longer was always healed more quickly than people outside our family would expect.

I was definitely viewed as different—even hard to understand—but every once in a while, someone would ask my parents how they did what they did with my brother and me. That’s when the logic and perfect reason of Christian Science could be shared. Even when their answers to questions were not readily accepted, people still respected my parents. At the very least, it was hard to argue with the evidence that prayer and a developed relationship with God could bring really good things to life.