Me? Good at math?
In middle school, I wasn’t a very good student. Math was boring, and I couldn’t bring myself to answer questions on the math quizzes, so I just wrote answers that made no sense and played games instead. My teachers thought I was stupid when it came to simple math, and so did I.
The school administrators told my parents that I would never go on to higher education and that it would be wise to pull me out of school and send me to a trade school, since I was never going to be accepted into college. My parents agreed to withdraw me, but instead of sending me to trade school, they enrolled me in a boarding school far away in Maine.
At first, there wasn’t much progress at the new school, which concerned me. The school was costing my family a lot of money, and I wasn’t improving. I was convinced that math just wasn’t something I’d ever be good at.
One Saturday night before the big exams at the end of my first semester, I was sitting alone in my dorm room when a thought started repeating itself in my head. It was, “The Lord is my salvation.” I knew these words were part of a Bible verse (Psalms 27:1), but they didn’t really mean anything to me. Still, I couldn’t get them out of my head.
I was convinced that math just wasn’t something I’d ever be good at.
That night, there was a big snowstorm, which limited attendance at church the next morning. Even while away from home, I had been attending a Christian Science Sunday School. But because of the storm, I was the only person in Sunday School that Sunday other than the teacher. I told her about the thought that had been coming to me. She said we should look up the metaphysical definition of salvation in the Glossary of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. It is, “Life, Truth, and Love understood and demonstrated as supreme over all; sin, sickness, and death destroyed” (p. 593).
It wasn’t unusual for me to be reading something from Science and Health in Sunday School, yet this was somehow different. Something new jumped out at me. While I had long been familiar with the words Life, Truth, and Love as names for God, I now saw that salvation meant understanding and demonstrating these aspects of God’s nature.
Wow! I knew this was something I needed to do and could do: Because God created me, it was natural for me to express Him in these ways. This was a call to action, and I saw that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I was expressing God’s qualities. Not even math! Mrs. Eddy would not have written it that way if it was not true for everyone, including someone like me.
I immediately relaxed. All my fear and anxiety over math was gone.
The following year, I had a class in geometry. My teacher would write a problem on the blackboard and ask me if he had solved it in the best way. I would usually show the class a better solution. He knew that I understood the principles.
I finished my high school education on the Dean’s List—an academic honor for having good grades—and was accepted into an engineering college in Boston.
My last course in college math was calculus, and the final exam involved solving a problem that required about three pages of writing to complete. I had never seen that kind of problem before, but I knew what to do.
Thanks to that original spiritual insight, math came to me naturally from then on.
Later, as I was standing in line at the rehearsal for our graduation ceremony, my math professor came up to me and said I had done a better job solving the problem on the exam than any other student of his ever had.
Thanks to the original spiritual insight I had received, math came to me naturally from then on. My Sunday School experience during high school had completely changed things for me. It showed me that I naturally reflect all of God’s qualities and that salvation is the outcome of expressing Him. All we have to do is listen for and respond to this call to action.
