How we see each other
Seeing one another the way God does lifts self-righteousness and opens the door to harmony and progress, as a man experienced when faced with challenging dynamics among his team at work.
Some time ago I worked on a team that was responsible for creating and developing a product and getting it out on a deadline. I’d been on this little team for quite a while when a new guy joined. While he was enthusiastic and very creative, he had a lot to learn. He would come up with ideas that sounded great but weren’t really solid, and that he wasn’t able to execute.
I found myself getting annoyed, because it would fall to the rest of the team – and in many cases, to me in particular – to figure out a way to make things work, often having to simply start over.
One day I asked another member of the team what I could do to stop this guy from always looking up to me to make things right for him. In the most loving way she could, she said, “He’ll stop looking up to you when you stop looking down at him.”
Ouch! I hadn’t realized I’d been doing that. She hadn’t said that to hurt me, and I knew that. Her response helped me see what the real need was: to see the man God created, rather than a frustrating mortal, and to acknowledge everyone’s ability to see ourselves and others that way.
Christian Science, based on the Bible, presents a view of man – a term that includes everyone – that starts with God as the source of all true being. Man is God’s spiritual reflection, His image and likeness. Everything real and true about us originates in God; and because God is infinite good, our true nature includes only that which is good.
In the textbook of Christian Science, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” Mary Baker Eddy writes, “The Scriptures inform us that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Matter is not that likeness. The likeness of Spirit cannot be so unlike Spirit. Man is spiritual and perfect; and because he is spiritual and perfect, he must be so understood in Christian Science” (p. 475). And elsewhere in Science and Health, she explains: “Man is more than a material form with a mind inside, which must escape from its environments in order to be immortal. Man reflects infinity, and this reflection is the true idea of God” (p. 258).
I was not looking at the new member of our team through this lens. I was seeing him as a prideful mortal trying to impress us with his personal abilities and defined by flaws – someone who saw himself as independent, not tied to traditional ways of doing things, creative, and blameless when ideas fell through.
In short, I had been self-righteously looking down on him, leaving God – the source of all original thought and expression – out of the equation.
So I turned my thought away from this picture of an imperfect mortal trying to impress others and sought to recognize him as one of God’s own ideas, expressing the intelligence and creativity of unlimited divine Mind.
Over the next several months there was distinct improvement in the team dynamic as well as in the quality of this man’s output. His work no longer required the significant help the rest of the team had been providing, and there was much more harmony and goodwill expressed within the team. To me, what we witnessed confirmed another statement from Science and Health: “The human capacities are enlarged and perfected in proportion as humanity gains the true conception of man and God” (p. 258).
How liberating it is when we see each other the way God sees us.