Article April 3, 2000 Issue

Learning from mistakes

When "blowing it" leads to blessings

By Clifford Kapps Eriksen

Admittedly, it was a bad mistake. I shouldn't have lost my temper and yelled at my co-worker the way I did, even though his happy-go-lucky attitude had irritated me for months and often delayed the timely completion of our work. But no sooner had the last angry word passed my lips than I recognized my mistake. I felt terrible about what I had done. I tried to make amends with a feeble apology, but inside, the anger was still there.

Only when pain immobilized my arm did I begin to recognize that I had much more to learn. It occurred to me that the pain in my arm and the anger I felt were related. I had allowed impatience, condemnation, irritability, self-righteousness, and guilt to govern my thinking and actions. Now thoroughly motivated to find a solution, I set about to correct what had caused the problem in the first place.

I knew that mere human goodness (as admirable as that quality may be) wouldn't be enough. Deeply effective spiritual healing isn't the result of human willpower. Genuine, redemptive healing, as taught by Christ Jesus and practiced in the Science of Christianity, includes a fundamental change in consciousness from a material sense of things to the spiritual law governing existence. It's through this spiritual perspective that we truly learn from our mistakes.

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