The Science of Belief... from "Authentic, a Memoir"

    

    The next evening it was then revealed to us at the dinner table by my dad about his relative, Aunt Grace who was a Christian Science Practitioner. Dad told stories of who’d been healed when she’d come over and prayed with and for them when dad was a child. One story went like so: My dad’s index finger was to be amputated the next day he was about age 10. Aunt Grace came over the night before and had the family of four at the time hold hands and pray with her together. The next morning the infection was gone, and the index finger was mostly healed.   

    The second story dad told that night was about his dad/Gramp. Apparently, Gramp suffered from outbreaks of boils. Gramp worked two and three jobs at time to provide for Nana and their children. Aunt Grace upon hearing her brother’s dilemma arrived at their house another night and said prayers with Gramp and the family. After that night, Gramp never had a boil on his body again. My dad a year later contracted polio and was diagnosed with polio on his eleventh birthday. The prognosis was ill-fated. My dad’s books and such back then in 1948 were burned. They expected my dad to not ever be able to walk unaided again. Once again, Aunt Grace came to the rescue in all her belief in the Divine. My dad not only regained everything, but by his sixteenth birthday he joined the high school wrestling team as he had finally been medically cleared for high school sports.

    My dad became a blue-collar worker, hard laborer. And when he ran, he was fast indeed, I saw the speed he had in his thirties. He would race my brother in the backyard. The only person they'd known of who practiced the way Aunt Grace had—they’d thought seemed to appear before them as their daughter had in the Spring of 1971. My parents were perplexed. For I was indeed a 'strange bag of lunch’ indeed.
    Mind you, no one in my family ever spoke of her until I did what I'd done that day. I had no clue I was practicing anything. I was just privately praying a lot. We weren't really even that religious. No one read the Bible, except me.---Jody-Lynn Reicher