My freshman year in high school was about to start. I’d felt pretty confident at my old school, getting decent grades and feeling comfortable with my friends and the teachers. But at my new school, I knew only one boy. And most of the kids were from a different ethnic group and religious background. On the surface, it didn’t look like we had much in common. Plus, they were way more focused on academic and athletic excellence than I was, and I wasn’t sure I could keep up.

This negative feeling got worse one day, when my geography teacher told me to point out countries, rivers, and cities on the world map. It turned out I didn’t know the answers. Talk about clueless! And that wasn’t all. For days afterward, the teacher persisted in this exercise, embarrassing me in front of the entire class. I felt like a victim for sure.

That’s when my parents and my Sunday school teacher told me I needed to take control of the situation. Take control? How could I when everyone outperformed and outranked me at school?

But my parents suggested I start each day with some spiritual preparation, reading the Christian Science Bible Lesson. They said it would teach me more about who I was as God’s child, and how I fit in. To do this, I had to change my daily routine – getting up earlier to read the Lesson, in order to keep my thoughts focused on all the good God was providing. So I did this before morning chores and breakfast—before going to school—and most of all, before problems distracted me and tried to pull me down.

Like any worthy pursuit, it took discipline and practice, and with some effort, I got the hang of it. What I was reading did make me feel a lot better—more confident. Some old habits of negative thinking and acting just didn’t fit anymore and had to be tossed.

I learned that Christian Science calls negative suggestions about ourselves the “Adam dream.” This dream-narrative is found in an account in the Bible’s Genesis 2 where a man named Adam falls asleep in Paradise. Then he and his wife Eve make the mistake of listening to a talking serpent, eating fruit from a “forbidden” tree of knowledge, and believing God’s creation includes both good and evil. Because of this they’re sentenced to suffer for the rest of their lives. (This sounded more like a fable than the truth to me!)

It just didn’t make sense to me that a loving, intelligent, divine Creator would create or allow another power to undermine His children and His own supremacy, and curse us for the rest of our lives. It’s like saying, if you mess up one arithmetic problem, you can never be forgiven -- or learn how to do it right. And what’s more, your mistake is proof that the entire law of mathematics is contradictory to start with, and works against mankind getting the right answer! So I came to the conclusion that it’s the fable of being cursed by sin that had to go.

In contrast to the second chapter, I loved how the first chapter of Genesis talks about God as the one and only Creator. And God gave us dominion over earth’s challenges. The rest of the Bible is full of stories of how women and men relied on God to save them from evil.

Then from reading Science and Health, I learned that because God is Mind, the one intelligence, then as part of God’s creation I was made to be intelligent. Of course I had to put it into practice. But this started by agreeing that as God’s child, I possessed the ability to do so.

Accepting this idea, I began to express more intelligence at school instead of being bogged down by labels. But I also had to actively reject the notion I was “bad”—at schoolwork, making friends, and sports. It was time to accept that I could be good at doing what was required of me.

All this is aligned with what Jesus taught. He didn’t go around blaming people for being inadequate, or saying they were cursed and doomed to suffer. Instead, he challenged us to wake up to our spiritual birthright as God’s children and live a more harmonious life. And he proved his words were practical when he healed people of all kinds of diseases and problems—and said we could do it, too!

I like how Mary Baker Eddy wrote about God as our loving Mother too, who creates each of us with a unique, spiritual inheritance that no one else can claim. We have a full share of God’s infinite intelligence and love, with no limitations on the good we can do—or how many people in the world can be smart, honest, athletic, beautiful or resourceful—or the infinite and diverse ways these gifts can be expressed.

So I trusted the fact that first and foremost, in God’s eyes, I was OK. No one was superior to me—and I could not gain any lasting confidence by thinking I was superior to others, either. We all had the right to be the best we could be—and divine intelligence and Love would show us how to use our gifts.

This growing understanding about who I was and how I fit into God’s creation, made me respect myself more—and everyone around me, too.

Soon I began to make friends, was invited to social activities, and got higher grades in my geography class—as well as in algebra and science. I also tried out for and made the track team, and did well in events and endurance tests.

And finally I began to understand why my teacher had been “picking on me.” He actually cared a lot about his students, and inherently knew I had the ability to do better all along. He just didn’t want to see me coast and “get by” anymore. And while I didn’t appreciate his tactics at the time, they actually worked to wake me up and turn to God to realize my potential.

By the end of the school year, my grades and athletic scores were among the highest of those tested. I attribute it all to:

• Putting God, Good first in my thoughts and my day

• Accepting who I really am as the likeness of divine Mind and Love

• Acting in ways that show I am intelligent and loving

I’m still learning today why putting “first things first” makes all the difference!