TeenConnect: Trending October 15, 2018 Issue

Overwhelmed? Prayer can help.

Kristin Manker

Originally appeared online in the teen series: Trending - September 4, 2018

Senior year of college. It seemed like my whole academic career had been leading up to this moment, and I was feeling the pressure. I had chosen to shoulder a lot of responsibility for my final year, including being a staff member on our school’s literary magazine and a board member for our yearly public affairs conference. I also had to think about my senior thesis—a project that would take the entire year.

I wanted to do a good job on everything, but a few weeks into the school year it became apparent that I couldn’t do it all on my own. My thesis research wasn’t coming together; my coursework was quickly piling up; and I felt pressure to do all of my extracurricular work perfectly.

Whoa. OK, press the pause button. Something needed to change, and that began with the way I was thinking about all these projects and responsibilities. In the past, I’d found that getting a more God-based perspective always helped, so I turned to the weekly Bible Lesson found in the Christian Science Quarterly, which is made up of passages from the Bible and from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. The subject that week was “Mind,” and it seemed tailor-made for me. As I read, this passage from Science and Health jumped out at me: “The divine Mind is the Soul of man, and gives man dominion over all things. Man was not created from a material basis, nor bidden to obey material laws which Spirit never made; …” (p. 307). Wow! I realized I didn’t have my own personal mind that was desperately trying to tackle a growing to-do list. Instead, I am animated by infinite, ever-present Mind—God. Better yet, all the things I had been prioritizing—time, sleep, intellectual understanding, and so on—weren’t the important factors, because God, who is infinite, governs every aspect of my life.