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Volleyball and the ‘sandwich prayer’
This article was written in Portuguese and adapted from the July 2013 German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish editions of The Herald of Christian Science.
Three years ago, I started playing volleyball at a small facility that focuses on volleyball instruction. I had a lot of fun! But then I joined my school’s team and the training sessions turned out to be hard workouts because we had to compete against other schools with strong teams.
Many girls on my team are a bit older than I am. They had already been training when I joined them in the middle of the school year. I began to get nervous when I made mistakes during training sessions and games. Whenever the coach corrected me during practice, I felt I should leave the team, because I thought I was not a good player. Sometimes I felt like crying. Since the coach became very nervous when we made mistakes during matches against other teams, I was even more fearful that he would scold me.
I talked with my mom and we started to pray. We held our thoughts to the fact that God is Love, Life, Mind, and that I, as a child of God, reflect all good, divine qualities and have the capacity to learn and play well. Therefore, I didn’t need to be nervous. I also realized how good it is to be part of a team because we develop team spirit. Even if an individual player plays very well, he or she still needs the team to win the game. Also, we support each other when we get nervous.
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