One day I was out riding my 5-1/2 foot tall unicycle and I hit a stone that caused the unicycle to stop but I kept going. When I fell I landed hard and twisted one of my knees. It was quite painful. I could hardly walk, and I knew I had to pray about it immediately.
As I prayed several ideas related to divine Principle (another name for God) came to mind and I was able to understand those ideas better by comparing them to the principles of mathematics with which I was already familiar:
1. Man, including woman, is an integral part of the divine Principle, God, just as numbers are an integral part of mathematics. Because of this I could not fall out of God’s being or care. As it says in Acts 17:28 “For in him we live, and move, and have our being…” Mary Baker Eddy describes this in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (page 361) by writing, “As a drop of water is one with the ocean, a ray of light one with the sun, even so God and man, Father and son, are one in being.”
2. Man, made in God’s image and likeness (See Genesis 1:26 & 27), is constant, un-fallen, and “very good” as declared by God in Genesis 1:31. His being isn’t variable; it is constantly perfect. With numbers, 8 is ALWAYS 8; it is never 8.01 or 7.9 (the value of 8 is invariably precise).
3. Man in divine Principle is not a material body; man is an idea of God, created spiritually, and an idea cannot be physically injured. Numbers are not material figures; they are ideas in mathematics and are not subject to material mutilation, wearing out, or being physically destroyed.
4. One definition of Christ that is given in Science and Health (pg. 583) by Mary Baker Eddy is: “The divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error.” When incarnate error is destroyed, healing is manifested. To me the manifestation of healing is God’s operation (or action) on earth. The operation of divine Principle (like the proper operation of the mathematical principle) always yields predictable, consistent, and perfect results. Therefore I could be confident in turning to Christian healing that the Christ consciousness would, indeed, heal this situation.
5. A sculptor must be outside of his block of marble looking at an accurate image (at least in thought) in order to carve a sculpture properly. Jesus had to leave his mortal body on the cross before he could perform the mental/spiritual surgery required to resurrect his body. So I, too, had to remove my thought from a very painful knee to get the correct mental picture of my invariable, wholeness in divine Principle’s unchanging law of goodness to have a healing of the knee. (I think this is why Christian Science Practitioners are helpful sometimes; they are outside of the body or situation that is seeking improvement and therefore are perhaps more easily able to carve out the perfect image of divine thought on human thought by seeing God’s spiritual and perfect man.)
By the time I thought all this out, I had such a clear sense of man under divine Principle’s control and protection that I had totally forgotten about my hurting knee. Sometime during this process of being engrossed in better understanding God, man, and God and man’s relationship with each other, my knee was healed. It has been years now and there has never been any further problem with my knee.