At one point I was asked by a highly successful husband-and-wife dress-manufacturing team to go into business with them. I would be designing my own line of dresses and manufacturing them, and the couple would put up the money. This appeared to be a wonderful opportunity for me; I was excited about it, even though it was not my usual line of work (designing costumes for motion pictures). However, after about a year and a half our joint endeavor ended abruptly and rather unpleasantly. My husband was informed that I had cost this couple fifty thousand dollars besides other complications involved in the business contract. My husband and our lawyer assured me that this was not the case, that the couple's bad management had been the chief cause. Whatever the reasoning, I was deeply distressed by this accusation, and I had no possible way to compensate the financial loss.
Over a period of years, whenever I thought of this business dealing, I tried to turn it over to my heavenly Father and His law of adjustment. One day I was asked to do some designs and to manufacture some dresses for a large industrial company. In thinking over the offer quite carefully, I realized that I had no facility for making the dresses. It was evident that to make them properly and at the least cost, the assignment should be turned over to an established firm making that type of dress. And I knew that the very best firm for doing such work was run by the man and woman with whom I had earlier been in business. After a brief struggle with the argument that I badly needed the money the assignment would bring in, and that the couple under consideration didn't, and a prayer to eliminate the last lingering feeling of bitterness about our past association, I made a recommendation to the industrial firm that this couple and their business be given the work. This action freed me completely from troublesome thoughts of a past connection with the couple.
Another year or two went by. Then one evening my husband and I happened to meet this couple in a restaurant. After a general greeting the man said to my husband, "Well, I have never thanked your wife for sending me that big order. I cleared fifty thousand dollars on it." The unhappiness of the past had been so completely obliterated from my mind that I just said, "I'm glad," and we went on our way. But slowly, the thought of that amount of money—fifty thousand dollars—reminded me of my struggles in the past, and of the couple's loss of that sum, which they had attributed to me. God had indeed given me the opportunity to redress any wrong that I was thought to have done. As a verse in one of our hymns says of the Christ (Christian Science Hymnal, No. 412):
