What Paper?

College causes you to have a lot of things going through your mind at once. It’s amazing that your brain can process it all without exploding. A couple of my classes use an online program. Without boring you with the specifics, just know that there’s a lot of deadlines and work to keep track off. That’s nothing new, but having it all online seems to make it seem worse. 

Tuesday night, well really Wednesday morning, I woke up at about 3:30 in an absolute panic. The first test in biomed is coming up and for whatever reason I thought that we had to write a 3-4 page paper summarizing the whole first chapter which was to be turned in Friday. I was trying to remember if I saw the due date of the paper on the course’s website, but I couldn’t remember for certain that I did. So at this point, I was still convinced that this paper existed. 

Now as you know, I’m not the type of person to wait until the last minute to do something. Yes, on occasion I do, but there's no way I would in this type of situation. Keeping that in mind, you will understand the terror I was feeling at this ridiculous time of day. I was already planning out when I was going to work on the paper and how it would fit into my schedule. Just writing about it right now is getting me all worked up. 

So now it’s 4:00, and I knew that there was no way I was going to fall back asleep. On top of being stressed out of my mind I would also be exhausted when I was trying to write this paper. Trying to calm down, I started to listen to some music. After about ten minutes, it hit me. THERE IS NO PAPER TO WRITE. Where did the idea that there was a paper even come from? How could I worry about something that didn’t even exist? Then I proceeded to laugh at my stupid mind and fell back asleep.

Now that I am fully coherent, there’s a lot of different ways that I could analyze this whole thing. Maybe I need to make a more detailed schedule. Since things are starting to get crazy, maybe it's a reminder to completely trust God. Maybe I need to sleep some more, or increase the caffeine intake. It’s one or the other, but I haven’t decided which one it is yet. Or maybe I just need to slow down. In the end, it’s a combination of all these things.

So next time you’re freaking out about something, stop and think about it. You might discover that what you’re worrying about doesn’t even exist. 

Matthew 6:34

Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil.