In the winter of 1866 an obscure, middle-aged New England woman was on her deathbed in a little town north of Boston. She had struggled with poor health for most of her life. A serious fall on the icy sidewalks of Lynn, Massachusetts a few days before had knocked her unconscious and complicated her already serious health conditions.

 

Her physician had done all he could but had given up all hope of her recovery and said she wouldn’t make it through the day.

 

Finally consciousness but still in considerable pain and unable to get out of bed, she asked for her Bible, which she had turned to for comfort since childhood.

 

It fell open to Matthew, Chapter 9 where Jesus healed a lame man. She had read that story many times and wondered why this sort of healing didn’t happen today like it did in Bible times. The Church of her day had said those miracles of healing only belonged to the Apostolic age and God didn’t heal people now like He did back then.

 

But this time when she read the story, in her moment of desperation, something was different. The words came alive and she felt God’s presence. Later she had a hard time putting what she experienced into words, but she realized that God was Life itself and that she would not die.

 

Suddenly, she felt completely well and strong. She gathered herself together, got out of bed, and dressed herself. Her friends and family in the next room, who were gathered with no expectation she would live through the day were shocked when she walked through the door.

 

Word spread quickly about what had happened and soon people began to ask her to come and pray for a friend or family member who was sick or dying. And through her prayers, many were healed. Her name was Mary Glover.

 

She had come a long way to this point in her life. As a young bride, Mary had moved from her home in New Hampshire to South Carolina. But her husband died within six months of yellow fever and she returned to New England expecting a child.

 

As her son George grew into a robust and very active little boy, being a single mother was too much for her delicate health, and her son was put in foster care with a family friend. Check when foster care happened

 

She married again with hopes of providing a father for her child, but her new husband did not keep his promise to care for George. Instead, he plotted with other family members to put George in foster care with a family who moved out West not too long after. Little George was told his mother had died and did not see her again until he was 35.

 

Her second husband eventually had an affair with another woman and Mary divorced him.

 

All this time she was searching for solutions to her health problems. She tried everything that was considered normal at the time. And she tried whatever unconventional methods she heard of. Some treatments helped temporarily, but she never found permanent relief or cure from her ailments. That is, until her the experience mentioned above.  

 

If all this had happened to you, what would you do? Mary did all she could to bring healing to others.

 

Once she was called to visit a woman who was dying of tuberculosis. When she arrived, the doctor was packing his bag. He had done everything he could to help her, but in his mind there was no hope for her survival. Mary sat quietly, praying by the woman’s bed for about 10 minutes.

 

All of a sudden the woman was well, no longer in pain, and sat up. The physician, who was just about to leave, saw this healing and was astounded. He asked Mary: “What did you do? You should write it down in a book so everyone can read about it.”

 

Mary knew it was God’s love that healed, but she wanted to find a way to explain her new approach to prayer to others. She searched the Bible to get a deeper understanding of God’s healing power and began to share and teach these ideas to others.

 

Her book, Science and Health, was first published in 1875 and continues to be a textbook of instruction on spiritual healing. She later remarried and came to be known as Mary Baker Eddy. 

 

There’s so much more to her story. Eddy had not originally planned to start a new church, but in 1879 it was the next logical step. She founded a college to teach people her Bible-based system of healing. She started a publishing company to share the message of God’s love and healing power with a wider audience.

 

But her over-arching goal was to bring healing and comfort to all she could. In her heart she felt she had rediscovered God’s healing power, which Jesus had practiced on the hills of Galilee almost 2,000 years before.

 

For 35 years her book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, was a work in process in an effort to clarify, simplify, and systemize her ideas to help readers understand God’s nature as purely good. Her desire was to empower them to practice spiritual healing for themselves by embracing a more spiritual perspective on life.

 

She passed away quietly in December of 1910 at the age of 89, but her legacy and life work live on and are summed up in the dedication in the preface of her book.