As I was heading down the front steps of my house one morning, I suddenly felt a sharp pinch on my arm. I brushed at it with my other hand and caught a glimpse of a bee flying away. I didn’t look at the sting, to avoid impressing on my mind an image of symptoms commonly associated with bee stings, but it was starting to throb, and it felt as if it was swelling and would likely be turning red. 

I hopped in the car and prayed diligently on my entire thirty-minute drive to work. When I parked the car and remembered what had inspired my specific prayer that morning, I did look at my arm. There was no bump, redness, or swelling, and I felt no pain. It was a complete healing.  

I immediately took note of how I had prayed. My prayer had started, as I had learned to do in Christian Science, with God. I declared God’s omnipotence, completeness, and goodness, and affirmed that as God’s child I could express and experience only qualities of God. Anything unlike God, such as pain, disfigurement, resentment, or frustration, is untrue because it has no place in God’s allness and goodness. 

We are each the expression of the one Mind, God, and therefore cannot take offense or have offense taken against us.

Then I thought about something I’d recently observed in our children’s behavior. When they run into each other while playing, any subsequent pain or discomfort seems to be more a result of taking offense than of the physical impact itself. For example, if the older child accidentally runs into the younger one and doesn’t apologize, the younger child may react by crying out, not because of being hurt but because of feeling offended. So I have instructed the older child that the appropriate response is to immediately apologize, make sure the other child is all right, and assure them it wasn’t on purpose. This lessens the offended reaction of the younger child and helps resolve the situation peacefully.

I realized that there was a spiritual lesson in this: The effects we may feel from another’s wrong behavior (inadvertent or intentional) have more to do with our reaction than with the incident itself. When we remove the mental or emotional reaction, we remove the foothold that wrong thinking might gain in our consciousness. To address such situations in prayer, we can acknowledge that God is the one, divine Mind and that this Mind governs all movement among its ideas. As God’s creation, we each are the expression of this Mind and therefore cannot take offense or have offense taken against us. On this basis, we can declare and experience freedom from any mental, emotional, and even physical discomfort that we have experienced. 

Many years ago I was driving to meet my great-aunt for lunch when a car changed lanes in front of me and caused me to brake suddenly. I was offended and honked my horn in response. As I accelerated around the car, I got a glimpse of the driver—and it was none other than my dear Aunt Edith, on her way to meet me for lunch! My anger immediately evaporated, and I felt extremely foolish, though to my relief she hadn’t seen me. 

I had been hoodwinked by the temptation to take offense. But I reasoned that if I had been so offended by my aunt’s driving when I thought she was a stranger, and not at all offended once I recognized her, then the problem clearly wasn’t with someone else’s driving. The frustration I felt was a result of my having been offended at another’s action and not the action itself. 

Thinking about these examples after getting stung that morning, could I still be mad at the bee? No! I wasn’t offended anymore, so I didn’t see the bee as an annoying insect that inflicts pain on humans. God created all His ideas with a good purpose, and He created them to coexist harmoniously. As Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “All of God’s creatures, moving in the harmony of Science, are harmless, useful, indestructible” (p. 514). 

This bee was doing its rightful work of pollinating flowers when we ran into each other, and bees are rather amazing creatures, I’ve discovered. I just needed to acknowledge their beauty and purpose, rebuke any suggestions of anger or resentment about the situation, and confirm that God always has complete control over His creation, including both me and this bee. As I yielded to the constant, ever-present goodness that is God, Love, encompassing all creation, there was nothing left in my consciousness to support offended thinking, and the physical discomfort “vanish[ed] into its native nothingness like dew before the morning sunshine” (Science and Health, p. 365). 

Later, a passage included in Mrs. Eddy’s book Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896 came to mind. It’s from an article titled “Taking Offense,” and it says, “The mental arrow shot from another’s bow is practically harmless, unless our own thought barbs it” (pp. 223–224).

The image of the barbed arrow sums up exactly what I was learning from my study of Christian Science in relation to the healing of the bee sting, the observation of my children’s behavior, and my reaction when I encountered my aunt on the highway. Harm inflicted upon us can affect us only if we accept the belief that we can experience something outside of God’s loving control. It boils down to our own choice of whether to be offended (i.e., to barb the arrow) or to acknowledge Mind’s harmonious government of its creation.

We can replace incorrect thoughts with Bible-based truths, as learned in Christian Science, and thereby demonstrate and experience our God-given existence as expressing His goodness, kindness, patience, understanding, and love.