Something Good from Something Bad

Ellen Harmon was only nine years old when something very serious happened to her. She and two friends were walking together when an angry older girl threw a stone at them. The stone hit Ellen right on the nose. It must have been a big stone, or else the girl threw it pretty hard, for poor little Ellen fell to the ground, unconscious.

When she came to, she found herself in a store. A grown-up offered to take her home. “No, she said, “I am well enough to walk.”

Soon after the trio started homeward, though, Ellen nearly fainted. “Please help me get home, she asked her friends. She couldn’t even walk, so the other two girls had to carry her home.

For three weeks she lay in a big cradle built just for her. She didn’t notice anything around her. Only her mother thought she would live. When she finally regained full consciousness, Ellen did not remember what happened to her. “Mother, why am I so weak? Why am I so ill?” She was very thin. Her young face wasn’t attractive anymore because of her swollen, broken nose.

Very slowly, she got her strength back. Then she was able to play with her friends again. But soon her feelings got hurt very badly. Her friends didn’t seem to like her as much as they used to. Sometimes they acted like her feelings weren’t important. They’d be rude or impatient with her.

“It’s my face, she said to herself. I’m not so nice to look at any more since my nose has been broken.” But she was the same friend inside, wasn’t she?

For several more years, she was treated badly by those who had been her closest friends. Poor Ellen! She couldn’t do anything about the change in her face. She still wanted friends to play with, but often they didn’t invite her to play with them. “If only that stone hadn’t hit my face, she’d say to herself, “people would like me.” How lonely she was.

What’s really sad is that those friends weren’t listening to Jesus. Jesus wants us to treat others the way we would like to be treated. I’m sure those other girls would not want to be treated as they treated Ellen.

But God caused something good to happen after all that unhappiness. After Ellen turned thirteen, she heard a precious gospel message. She became so very sure God loved her and had forgiven her sins. She was full of joy and love for Jesus. She forgot about her loneliness.

And then—the most amazing thing! She completely changed her mind about her face! Imagine that! She wrote in her journal “I started thinking that it was a GOOD thing that my face wasn’t attractive. I might have started thinking about how to be prettier and how to make people notice me and praise me.” That’s the way people think when they think about themselves a lot—but Jesus wants us to think about others, not ourselves.

Ellen thought back on the girl she was before the stone hit her nose and changed her life. She wrote, “I realized I had been proud of myself. I had always been eager to show off my abilities to others. If it hadn’t been for that stone, I might have grown up full of pride. I would have wanted people to pay attention to me and think I was pretty and smart. I might not have wanted to humbly give my heart to Jesus.”

God says that pride is one of our biggest problems. Pride stops us from realizing how much our hearts need to be changed, so we can live in heaven with Jesus and holy angels. Pride keeps us from asking Jesus to change our hearts.

Ellen was grateful for that stone, after all! It helped her get rid of her dangerous pride.