When I was in high school, I had a group of girlfriends whom I'd been close to since grade school. We shared everything with each other. I didn't ever want to give them up, even when things started to change. My friends started drinking and behaving in ways that made me uncomfortable. I thought at first that I could handle it by just hanging out with the crowd and pretending to enjoy myself.

There was a large wooded park a few miles from our homes where my friends and I would go on weekend nights after dark. We would meet some other teenagers there and have a party by the light of pickup truck head beams. They chose this place to meet because there were no parents around. Lots of drinking and other inappropriate activities would go on.

I had grown up loving and trusting in the teachings of the Bible. The Ten Commandments held great relevance for me. And so did the teachings of Christ Jesus. They were my guide in discerning right from wrong. I strove to live life by the lessons taught in the Bible, and I considered myself to be a moral person. After all, I did not drink or smoke; and I never considered using drugs, since becoming a slave to these things meant, to me, serving a master other than God. I kept telling myself that since I was not actually doing anything immoral, it was all right for me to be with people who were. Then, why wasn't I having any fun with these friends? It was hard to admit it, but I knew in my heart the reason why.

In Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy states, "Never breathean immoral atmosphere, unless in the attempt to purify it" (p. 452). I could not claim that I was attempting to purify the atmosphere around me. Although I was not partaking of any alcohol or drugs, I did find it easier to stand with a beer bottle in my hand than to explain why I didn't drink. I knew, however, that I was breathing in plenty of "an immoral atmosphere," and I realized that I was finding little satisfaction in this.

As time went by, I became increasingly tired of trying to fit in with my own friends. I began to wonder how people I had shared so much with could know so little about me and the way I felt about these weekend parties. It took a lot of courage, but I had to admit that I was the one who was not being honest. There is an old saying I've heard that goes, "If it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck." I obviously looked like a duck (someone who drank alcohol), but I knew that I was not a duck! I saw that in this instance I was pretending to be something that I really wasn't.

In my home and in Christian Science Sunday School I had learned that "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble" (Ps. 46:1). I knew that I could trust in God's strength and wisdom to lift me out of this troubled sense of friendship and help me be honest with myself and others. As much as I loved my friends, it was clearly time to take a stand out of respect to myself and to God, who is Truth. I also knew that God never punishes us for doing the right thing, that we can only be blessed by following our highest sense of right.

I prayed, thinking of a question from Science and Health: "Would existence without personal friends be to you a blank?" Mrs. Eddy follows this with the statement "Then the time will come when you will be solitary, left without sympathy; but this seeming vacuum is already filled with divine Love" (p. 266). I realized that my job was not to give up having friends but to find the correct sense of companionship.

I needed to value more of man's true nature as the idea of God. This nature is expressed in joy, honesty, trustworthiness, love, and kindness, all of which are qualities essential to good relationships. Having these qualities made me already complete and companioned, even if I was the only one in the room! I truly felt no fear of being alone, because I was reassured by the promise that any seeming void was already filled with divine Love. After all, Christ Jesus had already provided me with the example of how fruitless it is to hold to a personal sense of friendship as compared with the benefits of loving God and living life by God's rules. Even some of Jesus' closest friends denied him, betrayed him, slept during his hour of great need at Gethsemane, and left him on the cross. But God never betrayed him or left him. Jesus' humble yielding to God's will enabled him to feel unafraid and to demonstrate the ever-presence of divine Love in the resurrection.

So what happened with my friends? Well, one day I paused before entering the school cafeteria at lunchtime and listened for God's guidance. Instead of taking my usual seat at the table full of my old friends, I found myself going to a different table full of bright, happy girls who immediately accepted me into their circle. These girls were not only intelligent, they were fun to be with and they shared my values as well. This was just the beginning. In expressing more of my true nature, I attracted the respect and attention of a fine young man who, some years later, became my husband. At the time that we met, he had just attended a Sunday School class where his teacher had advised the students to look for the qualities in the people they dated that they would wish for in a spouse. He had been thinking about what was important to him in companionship and saw these qualities in me.

I didn't stop being friends with the girls I grew up with. It's true that we no longer attended the same Saturday evening parties, but we still loved talking together and sharing in each other's lives.

I'm so grateful for the wonderful lesson I learned about not only being who I really am, but representing myself as who I am. Surely, God meant for us all to be as He created us—His pure and good image. God has great things in store for all of us. Let's be the children of God He made us to be!