I was hit by a car when I was 22. I had broken ribs and a punctured lung. One of my ribs was resting on my heart. I was told that had it punctured my heart, I would have died. I was a Christian Scientist at the time, so after one night in the hospital, I signed myself out. Nobody was too happy about this (except my mother, who totally understood). The healing process was rapid, no doctors or drugs, though I did get xrays to check my progress. Inside of 6 months I was totally healed and back to work.

I learned several things about God from this experience. First, God is compassionate. I have absolutely no recollection of the accident itself, or the initial pain. I didn’t pass out, but God spared me from that trauma. Secondly, God answers prayers. Laying in that hospital bed that night I prayed for healing. I didn’t get any sleep that night so I had a long talk with God. I made promises to Him that I am ashamed to say I didn’t keep. But he healed me, all the time knowing that I wouldn’t be faithful to him.

Though this has NOTHING to do with my faith in Jesus, it cemented my faith in God the Father. My coming to Christ wouldn’t come for another 40 years, with bumps along the way.

In the years that followed, I unfortunately got caught up in the world, and fell away from faith. During this time however, I had several health problems that were healed by God. That God would even listen to me, and HEAL me during these times is a real testament to God’s love. Though I had failed Him, HE never failed me. In these 40 plus years I never went to a doctor or took any medication. By this time, it had nothing to do with my religious conviction, but only that I had never gotten into that habit, though I had picked up several bad habits along the way.

WHAT CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS believe

Christian Science was ‘discovered ‘ by Mary Baker Eddy around 1875. She wrote ‘Science and Health with key to the scriptures’ to interpret the Bible. Here are some of their beliefs:

God is Love
God is all knowing, all present and all powerful,
Sin does not exist.
We are all children of God.
They don’t believe in doctors or medicine because God will take care of your every need. They have changed their thought on this as they have watched believers die from preventable deaths.
They don’t believe that Jesus died for our sins, for to admit this, they would have to recognize sin.
The corporeal Jesus is separate from the spirit of Christ

This was the belief system that I grew up with, and it’s all I knew for most of my life.

COMING TO CHRIST

In 2012 we bought a home in Nokomis and started attending Grace church. For 5 years I attended church, never listening too closely, because I thought I already knew. One Sunday Chris’s message was on sin, and I began to listen. He told how he was such a sinner. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I knew my son, and for him to say this with conviction made me start to think about my own life. I knew that I hadn’t lived the best life, but I never considered myself a sinner until now. And it was just overwhelming. I listened intently as Chris said that there was a way out of our sin, and that was through Jesus. This was all totally foreign to me and I needed time to process.

For the first time in my life, I started to read the Bible without the aid of ‘Science and Health ‘. It didn’t take long to discover that CS was not reliable and that it was not true to the Bible. At the same time I learned some ugly things about MBE. Though MBE had always maintained that the Bible and God were her only source of inspiration, what she taught was simply not biblical. I was confused. I was positive that everything I was reading in the Bible was true, yet at the same time so much that I had previously considered true, some of which was the very BASIS OF MY FAITH was being questioned. I delved into the life of MBE, reading not what the church said about her, but what people that knew her said about her, both in and out of the church. My eyes were opened.

It’s been 5 years since I accepted Jesus into my heart and was baptized. I am so grateful to my wife and son for the patience and support while I went through this. My faith in God has been restored and I now know the truth about Jesus, my Lord and Savior. I know that even though I am a sinner, my salvation is secure and that I have an eternal place in heaven, all because of what Jesus did for me on the cross.

I’ve been given a gift, to know the real Jesus, the vast love that He has for me, and the gift of eternal life because of what He did for me when He died on the cross. It’s a gift that many Christian Scientists will never get to experience, and it saddens me greatly. As an Ambassador of Christ, I am on a mission to spread the true message of Jesus whenever I meet a Christian Scientist. It’s been an uphill battle, but my only job is to plant the seed, and let the holy spirit do it’s job.