Protection from a Bad Loan
Andrea, Idaho
I want to express my gratitude for the healing experience I had a few years ago. My husband worked as a volunteer in a jail ministry, and he mentored a young man with whom he worked for several years. Still does today. It’s been about 5 years total. This was about two years into that experience, and he had gotten out of jail, and he had gotten out of his halfway house. He was trying to start a business and had taken out a loan with a loan shark, essentially, for a truck. I heard about this through my husband explaining the predicament they were in. This lone shark got his claws into the young man for about a $40,000 loan on a truck, for about 30% or something like that. It was a phenomenal amount of interest. The truck’s engine blew up within a very short period. Now he had a truck that needed an entirely new engine. He had high loan payments. He couldn’t work with the truck, and a few months had expired. I’d gone with my husband and met the young man in a parking lot, where they were discussing the truck and the fact that the man who had given the loan at such a high interest rate wasn’t the owner of the truck but had sold it through a dealership. So, it was quite the tangle, quite the twist, very dishonest. It seemed he had a contract on this young man. We all went home, and it all looked quite bleak.
I started to pray about it, but to be honest, I didn’t know where to start. I found this article called “The Christ Blots Out Mistake and Penalty” by Paul Stark Seeley. I started working with it, and I had this idea of how you blot a stain out of clothing with a sponge or washcloth, dabbing it and watching it come up little by little, patiently. The Lord showed me in my prayer how to do that with this man. Dishonesty and manipulation can’t be part of the Christ, and anger toward other people that would cause a person to trap someone in this manner. These types of qualities can’t be part of the Christ man. I just had this sense of just lifting that stain off this person. It was one of the most profound prayer hours that I had during my experience working with Christian Science. Well, what unfolded in the next few weeks was that the truck had been sitting at a dealership because the engine had blown up, and he couldn’t afford to have it replaced. The man who had made the loan went to the dealership, picked up the truck, and left with it. Left town, apparently, and he never pressed any contract issues with the young man we were working with. This young man had gotten himself into a difficult situation. The loan shark never came after him for the contract or payments. It never even went on his credit record. My husband and the young man were able to go and obtain another truck with a legitimate loan. I am very grateful for this experience. It was one of the most profound experiences I’ve had working in Christian Science, being able to lift sin off another person—a presentation of something attached to the Christ man—and seeing the healing result. I want to thank this church for its Sunday meetings, its Wednesday services, the Roundtables and Lessons, and for everything on the website.