By Parmida Schahhosseini
It was a breezy Friday morning when I began to wait for the bus after coming out of my apartment uncharacteristically late. Instead of being frustrated, I felt peaceful and relieved that the toughest week of my collegiate career was technically over (mind you, I’m a senior, so I’ve had plenty of challenging moments throughout my years). Looking up at the blue sky filled with pink and violet tints, I couldn’t help but stand in awe of God’s creation. I was reminded of the fact that He has complete control over my life and is preparing me for greatness.
I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I decided to take 18 hours and work 31 hours a week between two jobs. Many people ask me how I do it and sometimes I ask myself that same question. During this week, I found myself asking that question even more. It all started on Tuesday when I noticed I accidentally deleted a folder on my flash drive containing four stories for a video project for one of my classes. It was devastating to see all my work gone and that it needed to be retyped.
Needing energy to type up several thousand-word essays, I went to Starbucks and got coffee. My name is a pretty unusual, so I understand people getting the spelling wrong. However, I was at a loss for words when my coffee was delivered. How you get Janita from Parmida after I spelled it out, I will never understand.
Honestly, it was humorous enough to get me through the morning. I like to think of it as a personal joke between God and I (and the rest of the people who ended up seeing my name through my social media accounts).
I skipped my class to work and hoped to finish everything, but it was too late. The damage had already been done. Having to tell my professor and teammates that I’d let them down was sometime I wanted to avoid at all costs. As I tried to hold back tears for something as trivial as not having my stories, I began to let it affect me. Fortunately, both my professor and teammate were encouraging and said me not to worry about it. Only at Baylor can you find professors that care that much. I ended up having three of my four stories done, but fortunately, my professor is making everyone rewrite their stories, which gave me more time.
Along with school, work added stress to my already busy week. On Thursday, the Baylor Lariat (one of my two jobs) was releasing the first of its Homecoming special issues. These papers are always longer, so you need more content to fill the pages. I know the Bible states that tomorrow will worry about itself, but that message just wasn’t getting through. I continued to worry because I didn’t want to let my co-workers down. Normally, I’m not able to get to the newsroom until 5:30 p.m. because of my other job and classes. I wasn’t sure if I would finish my stories on time.
Fortunately, there wasn’t enough space on Thursday’s paper to fit in my articles, so my editor saved my feature story to run on Friday. This meant I needed two more stories to go along with it. On Wednesday, I was halfway done with the first, so Thursday wasn’t near as bad as I thought it would be.
It’s amazing how God plans everything and makes it all to work out in the end. Even during my most stressful situations, I am able to come out of it victorious. From the little moments at Starbucks to the encouragement from my professors and peers, God was able to keep me sane in this difficult moment.