bmm

SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 ISSUE
How I prayed after I got mugged
Cathleen Ouderkirk
A friend and I were both newbie actresses in New York City, on our way home from an acting class. After going through the turnstile in a subway station, we headed toward the stairs that led down to the train platform. At the top of the stairs, a tough-looking teenage boy made an insulting remark to us.

To my utter surprise, my girlfriend hurled a terrible epithet back at him. I was stunned at her response. I knew her to be a thoughtful, intelligent, loving person. This knee-jerk reaction as an attempt to fight back didn’t seem at all like her.

As if to escape from her awful comment, we quickly walked away from the teenager, heading down the stairs and along the train platform. I didn’t say anything about the incident, and we both sat on a bench, where we chatted and waited for the train. A few minutes later, though, I noticed a group of teenage boys moving purposefully toward us.

I saw a gun and realized we were being mugged.

Before I knew it, they had us surrounded. I saw a gun and realized we were being mugged. Quickly, we found our wallets and handed them over, but before the boys left, they cursed at us, and I felt something hit me. There were bystanders further down the platform, so the group took off quickly.

I didn’t know I’d been hurt until my friend looked at me and cried out, “They hit your forehead with the gun!” She was alarmed by both the injury and the fact that there seemed to be some connection between the attack and the insult she’d hurled back at the teen just a few minutes before the mugging.

I put my hand to my forehead, and sure enough, there was blood and a wound.

What may seem surprising is that I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t angry and didn’t feel victimized. Based on my upbringing as a Christian Scientist, it was so obvious to me that all of us—the baiting teen, my unwise friend, the vengeful gang, and innocent me—were all playing parts in a sad story of different social worlds colliding.

But I also knew that, in fact, as real as it had all seemed, this was just a mistaken perception, a fable that was lying about our true identities. Even in that moment, I knew that every single one of us, in his or her own way, was a distinct, sparkling expression of God—of Love and Mind. I understood that if I’d known those boys individually, I’d have seen that they expressed qualities like loyalty, creativity, brotherliness, strength, and joy.

These were the qualities of their real, God-created identities that couldn’t be corrupted by the pressure of human circumstances. But given what had happened, I did have to clarify in my own thoughts that this was the truth about them.

How do you deal with negative thoughts that come to you, especially when all the evidence seems to point to those thoughts being legitimate? The Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, gave this very practical counsel: “Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 392).

That’s what I did. I refused to admit that they were “the bad guys” and instead listened prayerfully to what God was telling me about them. In my thoughts, I heard with great clarity that I could totally forgive these boys and love them—that I could insist on their inherent innocence and goodness. After all, Jesus taught us to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you” (Matthew 5:44).

That’s a pretty clear directive, so I just did it. Through the hubbub that followed—the police, first aid, and a detective interview—I kept my thoughts filled with love for those boys and their true nature and denied that hatred had power over any of us.

I didn’t experience any aftereffects the next day, though I’ll admit I was worried that I would have a scar on my forehead. To combat that fear, I asked a Christian Science practitioner to pray with me. In our prayers, we kept insisting on the spiritual fact that the teens were innocent, that I was innocent, and that therefore there was never any point of friction or any place where violence had occurred. I’m so grateful to report that the wound closed quickly and smoothly—so much so that when I visited my parents just a few days later, there was nothing to see.

I also never had any emotional trauma from the experience. It might sound funny, but the only thing that really stayed with me was the blessing of learning a little more about who each of us really is as God knows us.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2026 ISSUE
“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth”
Lisa Rennie Sytsma
In the context of contemporary culture, saying the words, “In the name of Jesus Christ,” may tend to conjure up images of horror movie exorcisms rather than healing. We don’t usually hear Christian Scientists approach a patient with the cry, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I declare you well!” But why not? Jesus said we could do it.

In John 14:13, 14, he’s recorded as telling his followers, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” The disciples took that very literally. At the temple called Beautiful, Peter healed a lame man with the words, “Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk” (Acts 3:6).

So it worked for the disciples. If we try it today, will it work for us? Well, of course, it’s not the mere words “in the name of Christ” that do the work. We need to understand the truth behind those words, as the disciples did.

Jesus claimed no healing power of his own. He knew he could do nothing without his Father (see John 5:19). The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, explains, “All power belongs to God; and it is not in all the vain power of dogma and philosophy to dispossess the divine Mind of healing power, or to cast out error with error, even in the name and for the sake of Christ, and so heal the sick” (No and Yes, p. 42).

In fact, every healing accomplished in Christian Science is done in the name of Christ, for the simple reason that Christian Scientists heal in the same way the disciples healed—that is, in the way Jesus taught them, and us, to heal. But what does it mean to ask something in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth? For starters, asking in Christ’s name reminds us that what we request needs to reflect the nature of Christ. It must be unselfish, humble, and in harmony with spiritual reality.

Every healing accomplished in Christian Science is done in the name of Christ—that is, in the way Jesus taught us to heal.

Next, it means remembering that our authority to receive what we ask is the same divine authority that lay behind Jesus’ healing and saving work. God doesn’t grant our request because of the force of our personality or how important we are by human standards. He knows each of us as His beloved child, and He is constantly pouring out His goodness for us.

Jesus fully expressed Christ, which Mrs. Eddy defines as “the divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 583). Jesus’ every thought, every act, every word was in harmony with his Father, God. He was able to manifest divine power to destroy sin, sickness, and even death because at no point did he concede power, reality, presence, substance, or law to anything other than God and God’s creation.

He taught us to follow him, to think and act as he did—in his name, or faithful to his nature. As we strive to do this, we increasingly find that, in reality, we have that same nature, the nature with which our Father, God, endowed His full creation. Each expresses that nature in a unique and original way, but each, in reality, has the strength, the understanding, the faith, the firmness, and the trust in God to see healing. As we abnegate a false, material sense of our identity for the identity with which God has actually endowed us, our ability to see and do good expands.

Finally, asking in Christ’s name reminds us that none of this is theoretical. The spiritual laws upon which Jesus based his healing works have already been demonstrated—by Jesus. Moreover, eighteen hundred years after Jesus’ ascension, Mrs. Eddy, based on her deep study of the words and works of Jesus, proved that those laws are divinely scientific and therefore eternal. She shared her discovery with us in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, so we can prove the power of these laws as well.

The phrase “in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth” is no longer relegated to Bible history. Understood in its true spiritual import, it is a practical reminder of the spiritual laws by which we can and do heal today.

Lisa Rennie Sytsma,
Editor