It was Tuesday night. Two days remained until my big music history exam, and although I had been studying intensely for days, I still felt unprepared and inadequate. Usually, classes come easily to me, but over the previous few weeks this particular class had proven to be more demanding and rigorous than I had anticipated. So I was feeling doubly unsure of how to approach the large exam that faced me. I studied between classes, during meals, and even tried to review material in my head as I feel asleep each night. Yet somehow the more I studied, the more pressure I felt.
Suggestions of stress and limitation pushed their way into my thought, and at first I didn’t bother to address them as I had learned to do in Sunday School. “I’m too busy to deal with those thoughts now,” I said to myself. “I’ll worry about that after the exam.” Of course, this wasn’t a very good plan!
Two days before the test, I found myself sitting at my desk with my thoughts absorbed with limitations: limited time to study, limited space in my head to absorb any more information, limited energy to stay awake long enough to do what I had to. Suddenly, it became clear to me that on the human, material, limited plane, and in my present cramped state of mind, it wouldn’t be possible for me to study as much as I needed to. But rather than feeling that this was a dead end, I realized this moment was an opportunity for me to be liberated by turning things over to God.
