I’d had an old brassy-looking necklace with a locket in my jewelry box for years. Someone along the way had lost track of its value, because it ended up in a garage sale junk box. Some of its links were missing, so I never wore it. Finally I took it to a jeweler for repair. He told me the necklace was 18K gold and worth hundreds of dollars. No brass at all.

Now I have a new favorite necklace—not because it’s worth money, but because it’s given me an important insight into the nature of my spiritual identity. The necklace was always 18K gold, even when I thought it was brassy and cheap.  

Who knows what the necklace had been through over the years? Its intrinsic nature was unchangeable. In that very same way, our mortal history can’t really affect our intrinsic spiritual value, even if our lives seem full of mistakes. Our identity has always been perfectly spiritual.

In some ways I see myself as that necklace. At age five I was held captive in a friend’s home and sexually assaulted. When my mother learned about this, she prayed for guidance in how to address the situation in a healing way. The parents of the young man who assaulted me were shocked when she told them, and the man left the neighborhood soon after that. 

From this experience, I lost my sense of self-worth. As I got older, adults in my neighborhood, who befriended me, bought me alcohol, supported my truancy from school, taught me to smoke, and asked me to help them with illegal activities like smuggling goods across the Canadian border. After I’d sold stolen goods at school, the production and sale of illegal drugs came next. In middle school, when other kids drank milk from their thermoses, I quietly drank gin. Somewhere along the way I put myself into the garage sale junk box. I forgot my spiritual worth.

Many of us have a list—things we’ve done wrong, points in our human history that wave a red flag, crying, “See, you’re no good.” I don’t know all the answers, but there are a few key ideas that helped me stop staring at the list of painful or stupid events and see my life from God’s point of view.

I wouldn’t call myself the best spiritual thinker when I was in high school, but I did have a desire to see myself as good. Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires . . .” (Science and Health, p. 1). Some of the thoughts that were coming to me said, “You’re a hypocrite! You can’t study this Science if you’re drinking and doing drugs.” 

Mortal mind, or what the Bible calls “the carnal mind,” is opposed to God’s goodness and love. It’s always trying to suggest that we can’t explore spiritual truth until we’ve achieved a state of material perfection. Yet, even a small desire for good is strong enough to blast away that type of misguided thinking. 

From my study of the Science of the Christ, I knew that Jesus’ message to humanity is about our spiritual perfection. Profoundly simple, the Bible states, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). I wanted that goodness in my life, so I began to study Christian Science more. 

One day I read an article that talked about starting each morning with the Christian Science Bible Lesson and prayer. The author said something to the effect that we wouldn’t put our armor on after the battle. That message inspired me to study every day. I mentally woke up for the first time to the thought that the carnal mind is a type of enemy. It suggests that evil is a power and influences us to act in ways contrary to our spiritual nature. 

I began to realize that quitting drugs was going to mean losing my circle of friends. One day, during this time of spiritual study, a friend sold me some hallucinogenic drugs. I took them—and they had no effect. I told my friend they were bad. He couldn’t understand it, but gave me more. Guess what? These had no effect either. Then I understood. The drugs never had any power. A profound spiritual awakening was taking place, and my faith in their power was losing ground. I never took illegal drugs again. 

Desire for good was preparing my thinking to receive the Christ. The Christ is the message that comes to our consciousness and says, “You are my beloved. You are holy.” This message redeemed me, so to speak. One definition of redeem is “to make good.” I started to see the wonder of God as explained in Christian Science. As a side effect, the supposed “wonder” of drugs disappeared. I still remember the day I poured my drugs down the toilet. That was my new beginning. Although I still struggled with duplicity, I began to identify myself as spiritual.

Looking back, I would say it is never too soon to recognize the subtle way evil tries to reverse our attempts to love good and see good. In Mrs. Eddy’s book Science and Health, the chapter “Animal Magnetism Unmasked,” which addresses the issue of evil, is short—just seven pages—and is placed relatively early. I believe one reason she put it closer to the beginning than to the end is that animal magnetism, claiming to be a power, attempts to draw thought away from the spiritual. It isn’t a real power, but we have to be awake and protect our desire to live a Christly life. 

As I look back, I see that my greatest challenges came at moments of great spiritual growth. Those are the moments when we need to stay close to God’s Word. Surround ourselves with other spiritual thinkers. God defines us as intelligent, useful, brilliant, important, delightful, and loving. Animal magnetism would try to trick us into thinking that spiritual living isn’t satisfying. Instead, it suggests, satisfaction can be found in unhealthy relationships and activities. 

In The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, Mary Baker Eddy wrote: “Animal magnetism, in its ascending steps of evil, entices its victim by unseen, silent arguments. Reversing the modes of good, in their silent allurements to health and holiness, it impels mortal mind into error of thought, and tempts into the committal of acts foreign to the natural inclinations” (p. 211). 

Dark, self-destructive, sensual, self-depreciative thoughts are not our friends. They are not even our own thinking. They pull us away from spirituality and good, and invite cynicism and duplicity. We may even be tricked into distrusting God’s power and love for us.

For me, a deeper love of the Ten Commandments helped rebuff animal magnetism, as my scientific understanding of my Christly nature deepened. It’s not as simple as it sounds, but it works. My motto became, “If it breaks one of the Ten Commandments, it’s a wrong way of thinking.” Loving the Ten Commandments forces us to reevaluate whom or what we call God. 

Over time I began to understand what it meant to want God—intelligence, goodness, honesty, morality, spiritual abundance—to be the All of my life. This love of God gives us dominion over evil thinking.

 Over time I began to understand what it meant to want God—intelligence, goodness, honesty, morality, spiritual abundance—to be the All of my life. This love of God gives us dominion over evil thinking. There is nothing more precious than our spiritual understanding of ourselves and God. And no past action or regret has the power to nullify, tarnish, stain, or crack the integrity of our spiritual understanding.

When I was around 12, I joined the local branch Church of Christ, Scientist. Intuitively I knew church was a type of moral compass, and I wanted to align my life with “true north.” Church membership connected me with a wide variety of individuals who loved the same pastor that I did: the Bible and Science and Health. Without their knowing any details about my life, loving Sunday School teachers encouraged me. Practitioners prayed with me. Through my college years a wonderful variety of church members befriended me. Most important, though, the pastor spoke to me. Hymns spoke to me. A clear, steady message of Truth spoke to me. 

Joseph named his first son Manasseh, which means “to forget.” Sold into slavery at a young age by his older brothers, Joseph had quite a few things he needed to forget in order to forgive his brothers and move on. I can remember a friend telling me that there would come a time in my spiritual growth when I would realize those painful abusive human events in my past never really happened to me, because my true nature was spiritual and untouched by mortal elements. At the time I thought, “Oh, you don’t understand.” 

But guess what? I found that deepening our understanding of our Christly nature doesn’t cause us to suppress ugly events in our lives. Neither does it permit us to go on regretting them. Allowing the Christ into our consciousness redefines our history. We discover that those events are nothing more than “beliefs” about our identity. Our spiritual nature was never abused or touched. And by spiritualizing our thinking, we have the privilege of acquainting ourselves with our true, pure, sweet, durable identity.

Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered, for more than all others spiritual causation relates to human progress” (Science and Health,  p. 170). Popular human beliefs suggest that remembering and reliving evil can play a role in healing. The spiritual truth is that while evil needs to be uncovered, it is only through an awakening to spiritual reality—to God’s perfect, undiminished, untainted, unbreakable care and love for us—that true healing happens. 

Slowly I began to discover that it was only a kind of dream that said I’d ever strayed from my heavenly Father, or that God had ever left me unprotected. Just like my gold necklace, those events could never affect or touch my intrinsic value or worth. 

The belief of mortality attempts to scratch our identity in any way it can. The marks, in the form of human disappointment, tragedy, accident, are nothing more than beliefs. The path to our salvation, the road out of those beliefs, is indicated in Paul’s words “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (Phil. 4:8). Practicing the Science of the Christ erases the imprint of mortality and removes the scratches. That is nothing to regret.