Getting past who’s right and wrong
When we’re open to the idea that everyone has a God-given ability to know and do what’s right, everybody benefits.
In the flyleaf of my mother’s Bible is a sentence she’d written: “There’s no me to do right; there’s no me to do wrong; there’s just God and His faultless idea.”
That’s not to say that we don’t exist, or that what we do doesn’t matter. Rather, it means that there’s more to us than mortal personalities that are either good or bad. We’re God’s children, or ideas – spiritual and good – and therefore inherently capable of doing what’s right because God is the source of universal good. Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, defined “Mind” in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” in part as “The only I, or Us” (p. 591).
These ideas helped me when my teenage daughter called in tears from camp. Her friends were doing something dangerous, and she asked them to stop. When they didn’t listen, she told her counselor, who brought the camp director to talk to the girls. This stopped the activity – but after that, the cabin mates wouldn’t speak to my daughter.
I assured her that she’d done the right thing, and said I would pray with her. But as I prayed, I struggled with how proud I was of my daughter for doing the right thing and with judging these other girls as not so good.
I thought about that sentence in my mom’s Bible and realized I had to be willing to give up the limiting notion of personal good and personal evil, and instead see that we are all God’s faultless ideas.
It took almost an hour to wrestle down the desire to hang on to personal good, but when I yielded to the truth, a beautiful peace came over me. Just then the phone rang, and my daughter’s cheerful voice said, “We’re all talking again!” And at a gratitude campfire later in the camp session, one of the girls said, without referring to this specific instance, “I’m grateful to be in a place where when you are doing something wrong, you are loved enough to be helped to stop doing it.”
God speaks to every one of us about our faultless being.
Adapted from the July 29, 2022, Christian Science Daily Lift podcast.