How to be 'really' right
My track record for being right about things - at least what I think is right - is pretty strong, but when it comes to being really right about things, my record is still fairly modest. I'm learning there's a big difference between the two.
Being humanly right often places one in the category of victimized, helpless, imposed upon, and self-righteous people worldwide, who are waiting for others to change in order to find justice. But being really right puts one in the powerful position of seeing things the way God sees them and of being able to bring healing solutions to the smallest and largest of human problems. I recently had a small victory that illustrates this.
My husband is a Renaissance man. He has many areas of interest and expertise - historic preservation, art, architecture, world travel, antique cars, to name a few. That would all be wonderful, except that along with these interests come collections of all kinds. And storing these items has not always been easy for our family.
So one day when my husband couldn't find the detail drawings he'd done for a building project, drawings he needed to take to a meeting in a couple of hours, I was faced with a mighty mental battle. On the one hand, it seemed very important that I point out, once again, that he needed to be more organized.
On the other hand, I had just been praying to understand more clearly the nature of each of us as the perfect image and likeness of God as the Bible declares us to be. A statement by Mary Baker Eddy in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" expresses the truth I was glimpsing: "The great truth in the Science of being, that the real man was, is, and ever shall be perfect, is incontrovertible; for if man is the image, reflection, of God, he is neither inverted nor subverted, but upright and Godlike" (p. 200).
This had to mean that my husband, as God's child, expressed the precision, order, and clarity of divine Principle. The struggle, though, was whether I was willing to give up being humanly right for the spiritually universal and powerful position of being divinely right.
It took a half hour to wrestle through the voice of fear that said, "If you don't let him know he needs to be more organized, we'll keep having episodes like this." But another voice was rising louder and clearer above the fear. It said, "Isn't the defense of what you know of God's child and the possibility of finding his drawings more important to you than being humanly right? The truth about man as God's idea has got to be more powerful to bring out orderliness than all the nagging on earth."
As I became more aligned with this message of divine rightness, the universal perfection of all of God's ideas, I felt calm and even joyful. I found myself suggesting to my husband that instead of frantically looking for the drawings, he might sit down and begin drawing them again. This was ridiculous at first because there was so little time. But my husband must have felt the calmness and authority of this idea. He got out his graph paper and headed to his bookshelves to find some books he'd used in doing his drawings. In a few moments I heard, "I found them!" They were tucked carefully in one of the books he'd used some weeks ago. His willing obedience to begin drawing again had brought them to light.
Moments like this remind me of my mother's words: "It's not about the 'me' to do right. It's not about the 'me' to do wrong. It's about God and His faultless idea." Getting past our personal strengths and weaknesses and righteous indignation or self-deprecating sense of failure allows us to find a new sense of identity as the faultless idea of an unerring God. Even just to glimpse this is to begin finding freedom from being stuck in the endless struggle over human right and wrong, and to experience a justice that holds each one of us in universal goodness and harmony. And that's how to be really right.
