Be Yourself

Do you long to feel at ease with yourself, but instead feel at odds? Do you pursue the company of other people in the attempt to forget feelings of dissatisfaction with who you are? Or, seeing that others appear self-confident, do you wish you were more like them?

There's a better way to spend your time. You can, of course, learn from others in developing your interests and talents. But you can never take another person's identity, nor can another take yours. We each must express God's goodness in our own individual way.

Emulating others to the point of putting them above ourselves, believing that they are more interesting, worthy, or talented, is a waste of effort. It amounts to believing oneself to be a small boat adrift on a vast ocean, with no control of the steering. We all need reliable guidance, and experience teaches that we cannot depend on human personality for our well-being. Much as you may love the person on whose life you have attempted to model your own, this attempt simply doesn't allow the space in which to expand, in which to discover your own self. In order to live calm, steady, and successful lives, we each must acquire the ability to be ourselves.

How can we achieve this essential goal?

First we can recognize that our true identity is God-given - complete and whole, untouched by imperfection or by mortality. The world is full of apparent sin, suffering, and disease, and of people who don't really much like themselves or each other (or, if they do, it's only for fleeting moments). As in the biblical allegory of Adam, made out of the dust of the ground, and his wife Eve, made from his rib, these views of ourselves are ones of mortality, fallibility, and dissatisfaction. But God is infinite and good, and He sees nothing of this - a false, dreamlike view of humanity. He created us to be individual and made us spiritual and perfect, as good as He is (see Genesis, Chap. 1).

It's as we begin to practice looking out more and more from a perfect, spiritual point of view that we become less and less liable to consider ourselves or anyone else to be mortal, disturbed, disheartened, vulnerable, disoriented.

We can listen for God's guidance, which comes in unlimited thoughts of good. These quell ruminations of anger and imperfection and end the pressure to base one's identity on anything but God. Erring personality traits disappear in the light of what is true. We find a deeper dimension to our lives, a spiritual one, from which nothing can ever separate us.

Christ Jesus showed how to build one's life on the one perfect model. He understood us all to be God's perfect expression. Early in his ministry, when he was tempted to be doubtful, to think worldly thoughts, he was able to say, "Get thee hence, Satan" (see Matthew 4:1-11). He proved himself invulnerable to evil. At all times he leaned on God to find his identity, his supply, his activity. He proved them all to be intact and inviolable. The current of spiritual understanding that ran through his life was the deepest possible, emanating from pure thoughts direct from the one universal creator, our ever-caring Father-Mother, God.

The Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, studied the teachings and healings of Jesus, and perceived that we can each follow in his footsteps, finding our own identity in God. Her book "Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures" explains that Jesus "... found the eternal Ego, and proved that he and the Father were inseparable as God and His reflection or spiritual man" (Pg. 314). And Jesus also proved that this describes the true selfhood of you and me as well.

We need not believe that we're forced by human circumstances to drift through our days at odds with ourselves. As we develop the ability to view ourselves as expressing the nature of God, seeing the world from the point of view of His creation, we find ourselves free to hear Him, the divine Mind, saying, "You are my beloved child." When we practice this listening to God, we not only find blessings for ourselves in all we do, but we inevitably bring help and healing to the world. We then live more vital and vigorous lives.