Does everybody like you?

Julia Schechtman Pabst

Have you ever felt unpopular, or that people like someone else much better than they like you? I know how it can be because I've felt that way sometimes.

I remember a couple of years in school when I knew that I was considered the second most unpopular girl in the class! It bothered me very much. But over the years, as I studied Christian Science, I began to notice what Mrs. Eddy writes on the subject of popularity. This sentence about Christ Jesus from her book Science and Health interested me: "The 'man of sorrows' was in no peril from salary or popularity." Popularity— a peril? Why?

One answer that came to me was that it could make you self-satisfied. Popularity could keep you from growing, from putting off a limited, mortal sense of yourself for the true, spiritual sense of man as made in God's image and likeness. And I definitely wanted to be growing spiritually. Then I came across this statement of Mrs. Eddy's in her Miscellaneous Writings: "Popularity,—what is it? A mere mendicant that boasts and begs, and God denies charity." I looked up the word mendicant in the dictionary and discovered it means "a beggar."

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Does everybody like you?

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access