For Teens August 20, 2018 Issue

Stress-free paper writing

Lindsey Biggs

It was exam time. I had already written five papers and had two more to go. On Friday night I started one of the two remaining assignments. I was feeling a lot of pressure because I needed to finish this paper by Saturday afternoon in order to complete my last one on Monday. Also, I’d never written this particular type of paper before, and I didn’t know where to start.

On the private Facebook group for our class, I posted that I was freaking out about this assignment. My classmates offered their own laments. Reading their complaints woke me up. I realized I needed to pray—not just for myself, but for everyone. As a Christian Scientist, I’d had many experiences in which feeling more of the presence and power of God had brought a shift in my perspective about something—relieving me of stress, or helping me or someone I was praying for in some other tangible way.

That week, there was a passage in the Christian Science Bible Lesson, found in the Christian Science Quarterly, that said, “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God” (II Corinthians 3:5). I looked up the passage in another Bible translation, and it used the term competence instead of sufficiency, which clued me in to the fact that I could look at the passage in terms of mental capacity or sufficiency: “Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God” (New International Version).