Article December 17, 1979 Issue

Who are you listening to?

GENELLE AUSTIN-LETT

One night I had an energy crisis. A louvered door in my apartment was jammed. In struggling to get the door back on the track, I became quite impatient. Too short to really see the problem, too weak to yank the door back in position, and filled with resentful thoughts of the inadequacy of being female, I caught my finger in the track. Hastily I pulled it out, badly tearing the flesh and apparently breaking the finger. When I telephoned a Christian Science practitioner for help, she listened very patiently to my tale of woe and then lovingly asked, "Who told you that?" I was furious. I wanted sympathy. The finger hurt. I was wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness.

After hanging up quickly I began to clean the hand. As if someone in the room had spoken out loud, the thought came clearly, "Sit down." Reluctantly I obeyed. I began thinking about the practitioner's question, "Who told you that?" She had referred me to the passage in the Bible where Adam in the Garden of Eden was afraid to appear before the Lord God and the Lord God asked Adam, "Who told thee that thou wast naked?"^{Gen. 3:11;} I could see at once the relevance of this challenging question. After all, who told me I was too short, or too weak, or too ignorant? Not God, divine Love, who knows nothing of lack or limitation. I didn't need to accept mortal mind's pattern of limitation.

I realized that in losing my temper I was evidencing a shortage of patience. Being depressed and bitter was like saying to God, "I'm looking at part of Your creation, and it's a mess." That was a false view, a lack of spiritual perception. In the Bible we are told "our sufficiency is of God."^{II Cor. 3:5;} This is not just a theory but demonstrable truth, and if we look to God, we never look in vain. I had been believing God's child could suffer a shortage or lack.