Years ago when I was making the transition between my work with a local dance company and a new career, I had a healing of an inflamed and swollen eye. Although I was no longer officially working for the company, they would sometimes ask me to come to rehearsals and give notes about what needed improvement. One night, I went to a dress rehearsal for an important opening the next evening. The rehearsal was a mess. The dancers were under-rehearsed, the lighting was bad, the costumes didn’t fit—you get the picture.
Most of these things seemed impossible to change by the next evening, so I said the minimum and ran for the door. As I drove home, I was mentally ranting about how sloppy things were, and how that wouldn’t have happened while I was working there.
When I awoke the next morning, my eye was painfully inflamed and swollen shut. I called a Christian Science practitioner and asked her to pray for me. She asked me to study these Bible verses: “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:3–5).
