Max Warner -The Christian Science Journal, March, 2007

As soon as I received my acceptance letter to college, I began to imagine what my first semester would be like. I saw college as a welcome change of scenery, because of the size of the school (much bigger than my high school), the athletic and academic opportunities, and its geographical location—the college was several hundred miles away from my home in Missouri. I looked forward to instantly making many new and interesting friends, as well as having an awesome season as part of the cross-country running team. I was also excited about being able to study subjects that really interested me and to define a major course of study for myself. I spent the end of my senior year in high school and most of my summer with these thoughts and plans.

When I finally arrived on campus in August to begin cross- country camp a week before classes started, I was thrilled. I felt like I was really growing up.

Unfortunately, my vision of the perfect school year began to slip away about three weeks after I started classes. After spending seven years of junior high and high school at The Principia, an entirely Christian Science community, I found it a real shock to all of a sudden be one of only two Christian Scientists who I knew of on campus. I was also caught off guard by the quick pace of the classes, as well as the non-stop style of teaching by the professors, which forced all of the students in the class to be constantly writing in their notebooks with very little time for questions or verification of materials or ideas. My first semester was turning out to be nothing like I had hoped.

When I was in high school at home and I felt overworked, or I was put into a situation that I knew needed to be addressed prayerfully, I would look to my Sunday School teachers or my academic teachers or coaches, who were all Christian Scientists. There was never a shortage of people willing to help. However, now that I was at college, I was spending all my time on my school work, with the cross country team, or trying to catch up on the sleep that I just couldn’t seem to get enough of. I felt that I had no time to address any problems with Christian Science. The local Church of Christ, Scientist, had only about a dozen members and no Sunday School. At this time, I was unsure about my status as a Christian Scientist. My study of Christian Science kind of slipped by the wayside.

My sense of disorientation reached a breaking point in early September after classes began. I came back from a particularly long run one day and found that my right foot was very painful. This was a scary situation for me because it was the first injury that I’d ever had without anyone else around to help me through prayer. I decided then that this was going to be my opportunity to get serious about Christian Science.

The next day I logged onto spirituality.com, a Christian Science website, and signed up to receive the Weekly Bible Lesson online. The nearest Christian Science Reading Room was open for only a couple hours a day and always when I had class. At first, I didn’t read much of the Lesson…. I just read and searched for one solid idea, one spiritual thought that I could hold onto and better understand throughout the day. I remembered having to do something similar in Sunday School when I was younger, except we called these ideas “gold nuggets.” I’d always thought that was a dumb idea, but now here I was doing just that. One of the things I read that really stuck out to me in the Bible was something Jesus said to his disciples:

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest” (John 4:35).

This verse meant to me that I didn’t need to wait and work myself back up to any previous level of competence as a Christian Scientist or understanding of God in order to reap His benefits. The understanding of who He is already existed within my consciousness. I initially thought I had to pound the books (the Bible and Science and Health) in search of spiritual inspiration, but I realized that this inspiration was immediately available to me as God’s reflection.

I found that when I began making my relationship with God a priority in my life, and continued reading the Bible Lessons, eventually studying twice a day—reading the Lesson in the morning and reading Science and Health or Prose Works in the evening—it helped prepare me for the hours of academic studying I had later in the day, or whatever other activities I had. I also found that this prayer lessened the stress I felt from my school work, and simultaneously, the pain in my foot began to lessen. What’s more, I found a church about an hour away that had a college student class. I began attending regularly with another Christian Scientist on campus. I felt that I was truly beginning to do some of the work that Jesus asked of us as seekers of Truth, like putting God’s plan before our own plans. And I couldn’t have been happier.

I was able to find more comfort and peace in my busy life. I began to make more friends and meet more people and was able to do my school work in a freer manner, which resulted in better grades and better relations with my professors. My daily prayers, or what I call my metaphysical work, also helped my healing with my foot, to the point that I was able to run again sooner than I had expected. So while my first semester at school did not turn out the way I had initially hoped it would, it actually turned out to be so much more.

Max Warner is a college freshman in south-central Michigan.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Stress, College and University. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.

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