Women Alive

I’m writing this on March 14, 2011.  Many of my teammates have brought to my attention via their Facebook statuses, that it is, in fact, 500 days until the Olympic Games. This is the buzz-word when I arrive for practice here on Melton Lake in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  As two girls heave a medicine ball between each other during our core circuit, they laugh and joke.  Our coach quips, “Focus girls – there’s only 500 more days to get it right.”  This sends me spinning more or less into anxiety. How can 500 seem like so little and so much at the same time? 22 of my teammates and I have been on a training camp for 17 days now.  We have trained 2-3 times every day, except for last Sunday, when we went running for an hour. This morning was my ‘breaking’ day.  I was determined to make it through camp strong.  I was going to be tougher than anyone else.  As girls got sick and injured, I said it wouldn’t happen to me.  When people complained about too much work, I tried to bite my tongue.  And then today I got in a few tangles with other boats, took bad courses through sections of the current, and tried to pull harder to make up for ground I was losing. 15 minutes into our 40 minute piece, I had been passed by the boat that started behind me, and the palm of my hand had been rubbed raw and was bleeding all over my oar handle.  I was breathing in sharp, painful gasps and fighting back tears. I was unraveling.

In rowing, the secret to speed is being relaxed. This allows the boat to run underneath you during the ‘recovery’ phase of the rowing cycle, in which the blade is out of the water.  My blade was smacking all around.  The more I heaved against the oar, the more disruptive I was becoming to my boat speed.  Often, this seems like it’s a reflection of my life: I try harder and harder to gain the things that God wants me to rely on Him for.  If there is one thing I have continually learned it’s that I can’t do this on my own!  None of us can.  God continually brings me to the point where I have no choice but to rely on Him.  When I feel physically and mentally exhausted, when I am broken and in despair, this is when God steps in and tells me that He is sufficient for me.  He tells me I am not to be anxious about anything, but to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Matthew 6:25-34) Similarly, the Book of Romans warns us that, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:6) This reminds me that I need to keep my mind focused on God, and not on me!  The harder I try to attain this life and peace by focusing on controlling the physical aspects of my world, the more quickly I find myself anxious and stressed out… far from the life and peace I was seeking!  In his book, The Normal Christian Life, Watchman Nee writes, “It will help us greatly, and save us from much confusion, if we keep constantly before us this fact, that God will answer all our questions in one way and one way only: namely, by showing us more of his son.” (Nee, pg 2)

So how do we keep our minds ‘set on the Spirit’?  Romans 12:12 encourages us to be “constant in prayer.”  If you’re anything like me, this can be a bit of a challenge, as my mind races from one thought to the next.  As an athlete, I’ve become accustomed to keeping training journals, although I was initially against the idea.  When my coach suggested I write all of my workouts down, I balked at the idea, feeling like it was a way for him to ‘check up on me’, or that I would feel guilty if I missed a workout and couldn’t write it down.  But he assured me that I would find it empowering.  This turned out to be true: seeing the outcome of all of my hard work built confidence in my belief in my own training.  I decided to take this idea to a prayer journal, which I began in 2008.  And you know what?  The effect was similar. I began to see how prayers that I would have forgotten about if they had not been written in my journal, had in fact, been answered! Like my training journal, it helped me build confidence in my beliefs in God.  This month, I’d like to encourage you to put down some of your prayers into writing.  Challenge yourself to be honest with God, and give God a chance to respond with His power!  Use your journal to give voice to the deepest longings of your heart, your frustrations, and your pain.  Use it for whatever you want… but be prepared to gain new insight into your soul and its relationship with our Creator.