I was in college when I first began having migraines. By the time I reached graduate school, they had become more frequent, and a year later, when I was a law student, migraines sometimes kept me from attending classes.
One day, while working with my study group, I felt the onset of a migraine. I asked my friends to help me, and they kindly arranged several desks in a darkened, empty classroom so I could lie down on them, using a coat as a pillow. But I was actually hoping to do more than just wait for relief. I had recently started reading the Christian Science textbook, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, where I learned that I could pray for healing.
Though I was new to Christian Science, the concepts I had been studying had profoundly shifted my thinking. Doctors had explained that medication might help manage the migraines, but I had gleaned from Science and Health the hope, and then the understanding, that permanent healing was possible.
Up to this point, my prayers had typically been humble, natural petitions asking God for help. Reading the Christian Science textbook, however, I discovered a different way to pray.
Science and Health describes Jesus’ prayers as “deep and conscientious protests of Truth, – of man’s likeness to God and of man’s unity with Truth and Love” (p. 12). Later in the same book, the author also indicates that the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples, illustrates the essence of Christian, scientific prayer – “the heaven-born aspiration and spiritual consciousness, … which instantaneously heals the sick” (p. 16).
The Lord’s Prayer acknowledges God’s supremacy and majesty, implicitly refuting anything unlike God. This is particularly clear in the last line of the prayer as given in the Gospel of Matthew: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever” (6:13). Jesus healed the sick on the basis that his Father was forever present, omnipotent, and completely good.
In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy illuminates each line of the Lord’s Prayer with its spiritual sense. For instance, the textbook follows “Thy kingdom come” with “Thy kingdom is come; Thou art ever-present” and “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” with “Enable us to know, – as in heaven, so on earth, – God is omnipotent, supreme” (pp. 16-17).
Reflecting on the Lord’s Prayer and its spiritual interpretation, I asked myself, “If God is good, all-powerful, and ever present, then how can anything not good exist?” Logically, I knew that it couldn’t. I could protest against a migraine because sickness cannot exist in God’s universe. Knowing that God, infinite Spirit, created man in His image and likeness and that His law of good is ever operative, I affirmed that I reflected God and that my true, spiritual selfhood was unmarred by sickness, pain, or sin.
Lying there on those hard desks, I reasoned about God and man in a fresh, inspired way. Guided by the Lord’s Prayer, its spiritual sense, and the desire to protest that sickness was not natural but unnatural to my true identity, my starting point was the all-harmonious and good God. I realized that a sovereign, wholly good God, whose laws govern all, could not allow pain or suffering and that I could not, therefore, experience anything but good.
As a law student, I appreciated the logic of case law and how it follows established judicial precedent. As I applied that to Christian Science, I recognized the precedent of divine omnipotence, which cannot be subverted, opposed, or nullified; the precedent of divine omnipresence, which rejects any reality apart from God and His goodness; and the precedent of divine omniscience, which establishes God as having a universal knowledge of Truth, where error cannot exist.
I reasoned that the precedence of this universal God, good, identified in the Bible as infinite Truth and Love, ruled out discord. I could experience only peace because I was created by a perfect God and am therefore untouched by fear, pain, or sickness. My protest that I was not sick became a powerful affirmation of my real selfhood: that I was spiritual, created in God’s likeness.
As I prayed, the pain dissipated until I could finally sit up. Understanding the basis of Christianly scientific prayer had healed me. And I have remained free of migraines for more than four decades.
We all have the right to oppose sickness by being truth’s advocate. Our prayers can move us from earnest entreaty to enlightened inspiration, and from spiritual protest to permanent healing, by affirming God’s power and presence and our flawless identity as His reflection.
Adapted from an article published in the Jan. 19, 2026, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
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