Article October 15, 1990 Issue

Quit standing in your own way!

Elaine R. Follis

Recently, a college student, explaining Job's defense of his personal piety, declared: "Job was standing in his own way."

Those words snapped me to attention! I realized I too was, on many occasions, "standing in my own way." The temptation to do so was particularly strong when I felt unfairly treated. But whenever I tried to "stand up for myself," reason gave way to belligerence, and compassionate listening to self-justification. My emotions appeared to be a major obstacle to finding a solution.

As I thought further, I began to understand one reason why this kept happening. I regarded myself as a good and conscientious person, and that part was fine. What wasn't fine, however, was my attitude that human goodness gave me the right to expect—or, rather, to demand—human justice and fairness. In the first place, human experience seldom works that way. And in the second, I was forgetting that an individual's goodness isn't self-created; it's divinely designed and empowered. As a student of Christian Science, I've been learning what it means that man, made in God's spiritual likeness, expresses the divine nature. God's creation does nothing on its own. Yet in expressing God's power, intelligence, and love, man knows no limit to divine good.

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