Prayer for a Final Exam

I was junior in college. I was failing a class in my major area of study. I knew that if I did not get a good grade on my final, I would need to repeat the class.

Our final was a take-home open book exam. What a relief! This should be easy, I thought. However, when I started doing the research to answer the three exam questions, I couldn’t come up with anything useful.

As the night wore on, there still was no answer. I realized that prayer was the only possible solution. Two verses from the Bible came to me: The first was, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee” (Isa .41:10). The second was, “And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” (Isa. 65:24) Didn’t that mean that God, infinite Mind, already knew the answer?

I remembered a Christian Science practitioner telling me that the same Mind that made the questions, also made the answers to those questions. My intelligence was not material, but spiritual. I did reflect God, infinite, divine Mind, and Mind would reveal to me what I needed to know about these three questions. During the night I researched my questions in the material from my class.

All night long I continued to pray, affirming over and over that I was taking this test for the glory of God. I kept affirming my oneness with Him. I gave thanks that I was intelligent, that I could comprehend this material. Even though I didn’t have an answer to this problem, I prayed that something would be revealed.

By 6:30 am, there was still no answer. I needed to turn in my test by 7:00 am. During that final hour, a few ideas repeatedly occurred to me, but I squelched them and resisted writing it down; surely they weren’t the right answers. Since the test was due in a few minutes, and no other answer came to mind, I frantically scribbled three sketchy answers to the three questions.

I felt uneasy about how my final exam would turn out. When I worried about repeating the class, I knew that I had to trust God. Since He had given me an answer, it had to be sufficient. To my surprise, I received a “B” on the final, so I finished the class with a grade of “C”! The answers I scribbled on the exam were the right answers. I celebrated the fact that I had raised my grade by trusting that God already knew the answer, as He had promised in the Bible.