Feeling self-conscious?
Every couple of years, my family would move to a small town near the next military base where my dad was stationed. I was always the new kid in school, and because of that, I felt very self-conscious about how I looked and was perceived by others.
This was most noticeable in high school whenever I stood in front of a class to give a presentation. Although I could present perfectly, my face would turn red with embarrassment and my classmates would giggle. In my senior year, I decided to take a drama class, thinking it would solve this problem. It didn’t.
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My face would turn red with embarrassment and my classmates would giggle.
When I started college, I attended the local Christian Science Sunday School. It was small, but I appreciated the spiritual support from the Sunday School teacher and began regularly reading the weekly Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly. In the past, I had relied on my mom’s prayers for healing—of chicken pox, mumps, and many other problems. Now I was learning to pray for myself.
As I grew in my understanding of Christian Science, I discovered that while I’d been thinking I needed to fix a problem, what I really needed was to recognize myself as God’s child—spiritual and complete—not a limited person who had something wrong with her. I didn’t need something to be added, removed, or fixed.
I read in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, “Man is the expression of God’s being” (p. 470) and “Comeliness and grace are independent of matter. Being possesses its qualities before they are perceived humanly” (p. 247). And I’d learned from reading the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible that man, meaning all of us, is made in the image and likeness of God and is made “very good” (verse 31). God being Spirit means that everyone, including me, is the spiritual image of God, made in Spirit’s likeness. So we express all the “very good” that is God’s nature.
That self-conscious person had faded away, replaced by this new view of my spiritual origin and identity.
As I prayed to understand this concept of spiritual origin, I saw that I needed to acknowledge that God made all of us—including me—to express this goodness. As I did this, I realized that I expressed many spiritual qualities from God, such as poise, kindness, helpfulness, and so on. I also discovered that I was no longer self-conscious about speaking in front of a group. That self-conscious person had faded away, replaced by this new view of my spiritual origin and identity. This has been a blessing and strength throughout my business career, as well as in serving my branch Church of Christ, Scientist, and working as the librarian of a Christian Science Reading Room.
What I learned from this healing was that rather than trying to change something about myself, I just needed to recognize, accept, express, and be grateful for all the God-derived qualities that were already mine as a child of God. They are already yours, too!