FITTING IN has never been my strong suit. But there's a difference between just being on the fringes and feeling shut out, ostracized. That's what happened when I hit middle school. And that was hard.
The trouble started at the beginning of middle school, when I couldn't seem to connect with my classmates. We didn't really share the same interests, so there wasn't a whole lot to talk about. And on top of that, my class was full of cliques. Since there were only 35 of us in my grade, that made the cliques even more pronounced. If you weren't "in," you really felt excluded. And I definitely wasn't "in."
What can you do in a situation like that? Change? I knew something needed to change, but I didn't want it to be who I was. That felt superficial—impossible, actually. So I decided to change the way I was thinking about things instead. I've learned from going to a Christian Science Sunday School that situations shift when you pray to see things the way God does. Since God is All and 100 percent good, then good must be all there is. My prayer was to see the goodness that I knew must be there at school. So I prayed in two ways.
