Editorial February 4, 1991 Issue

A decisive influence

Elaine Natale

What's surprising is that they had such an influence and hardly seemed to realize it. I'm thinking of people whose words and deeds quite literally changed my life.

There was a special family that befriended me during my college years. I've forgotten the words of our conversations, but I've never forgotten how loved that family made me feel. Being with them was a lesson in kindness. I noticed the smallest details of their caring for one another and saw how this genuine caring spread to anyone around them. The very tone of their voices and their gentle, purposeful gestures showed me what respect and patience could mean. With the greatest admiration I watched them month after month in various situations. They were quiet, but surely not ordinary. Routine living was not as beautiful as that.

I visited the family on a day that had seemed like a personal disaster to me (I'd handled everything that day with a remarkable absence of grace). In a teary, awkward moment I told the wife that I wanted to be like her and her husband. She smiled and said that she thought she knew what I meant—and the explained to me that if I understood that I was God's idea, I could express the grace and intelligence and joy that were mine—and everyone's—as the child of divine Love. I caught a glimpse of what she was saying. It wasn't just her words. I'd already seen what this meant. Her life was the illustration of it. Those people were some of the first Christian Scientists I met.

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