Yesterday I had a statistics exam. Can I first just start out by saying how much I strongly dislike statistics? I mean, seriously! So, walking into my exam after being up until 3:30 AM at our church’s women’s retreat already had me a little weary, and the thought of an exam made the venti starbucks cup in my hand seem so incredibly inept. It was not but 15 minutes into my hour long, 23 question exam that my calculator broke. It didn’t run out of batteries. Trust me, I checked. It wasn’t me just entering wrong numbers. It literally just stopped showing numbers and started showing the dreaded “error” message. Now, even in my sleep deprived state, I tried to keep calm. I went through all the motions of doing the problem again, re-entered the numbers, and even reset my calculator. However, the thing just kept popping up with that “error” message again and again. After taking it down to my professor and having him tell me “well, yeah, that sucks,” I went back to my seat feeling frustrated and hopeless. And you know what my first reaction was? It was to keep hitting the same buttons on my calculator over and over again thinking that maybe the 700th time would give me a different result. Guess what. It didn’t. So, I finally resigned myself to the fact that I would be doing binomial functions by hand. When our professor called out that the hour was up and we needed to turn in our tests, I still had five questions left unanswered. So, I said a small prayer and randomly filled in the remaining 5 questions with answers. I stood up and chanted over and over in my head “do not cry! I mean it, Maddie, do not cry!” I made it just until I got into the safety of my car before I gave into my emotions and let the hot tears roll down my cheeks as I drove back to our retreat. It was lunch when I arrived and I sat down next to one of my friends. She immediately asked me how my test went, and with an overwhelming feeling of shame, I explained that my calculator had malfunctioned and I was certain I had failed. She told me about how when she was in college, she would listen to the AC when she didn’t know an answer. I sort of thought she was joking for a minute, but, no, this is apparently a real thing. It made me laugh thinking of all the crazy things that we tell ourselves will work when our own abilities begin to fail. About an hour later I got a notification on my phone that grades had been posted, so I excused myself from the conversation so I could go and find out what my grade was. With a racing heart I opened the notification and holy cow, I got a B! Now, anyone who knows me knows that never in my life have I EVER been excited for a B, but for this B I sprinted back downstairs and ran back into a circle of friends and mentors shouting with glee that I had made a B on my exam. It was minutes later that I realized through talking with someone that something so profound had taken place through my broken calculator. I looked back to my actions of clicking the same keys on the calculator over and over again, each time fully expecting there would be a different result, and realized I do this in my life and everyday actions as well. How many of us repeat the same actions over and over again and expect that somehow this time the result will be different? I would wager to bet that it’s most of us, and quite often. It took a broken calculator and a stats test for God to get my attention and make me see that there are so many things that I do over and over again expecting a different result everytime. Now, I don’t know what you do when your abilities fail; it may be listening to the hum of the air conditioning or creating a pattern with the answer bubbles on your test, but how often is it going to God and asking Him to reveal a different set of actions for you to do? If we really want a different result, we really must change our initial choices.
