Women Alive

Have you ever had your world turned upside down? By trade I’m an athlete, and have been rowing with the Canadian national team for 5 years now.  After the 2008 Olympics, I began a two-year masters degree program in occupational therapy.  During this time I continued to train as full time as possible.  It was a hectic lifestyle; getting up at 5 am, at the lake by 5:45, then to school or a clinical placement workday, back to the lake at 5pm, home by 8pm, make dinner, bed by 9pm.  For almost all of that time I was figuring in a boyfriend living across the country; a 3-hour time difference away.  Until May 10^th.  That’s when I felt like my life really started to unravel.  I got dumped.  Hard.

After that, I felt like I began living a series of worst-case scenarios.  Selection for the team went poorly, and for the first time in 4 years I failed to make the team.  Subsequently my funding was cut into more than half, and I began to doubt my own abilities as well as what I believed was my purpose on the team.  I watched many of my closest friends happily prepare to travel to New Zealand for the World Championships, and then win a silver medal without me.

Determined to take hold of my future, I trained full time right through my month off, while the team was overseas.  During this time, I gained an entirely different perspective of life on the ‘outside.’  My eyes were opened to all of the hardworking athletes that hadn’t made the team either.  These girls had all been my friends before, but I realized that in as many ways as I had thought I had been supportive of them, there had been no way for me to really understand their struggles.  I was acutely aware of the laughter, positive energy and team building that was happening all around me within the World Championship crews that I was not part of.  Suddenly, everywhere I looked I was reminded of the hierarchy within the system that I lived, and my new place within that hierarchy… my new place on the bottom.  Resources, such as clothing, supplements and medical care decreased.  As I trained daily with the women who had not made the team, I saw how most of them had put in the same amount of work (in some cases, even more) but had not had the same success or received the same reward.  I came to see that as much as this was a lesson that I did not want to learn, I was starting to learn the difference between being compassionate to others from the outside, and now being compassionate from the inside.  These two things are very, very different.

In our society there are many people that have worked just as hard as the rest of us expecting the same rewards, and have been hindered by disability, disease, poverty, social stigma, racism and other biases. It is too easy for those of us with privledge to assume that someone is living in poverty because they have not worked as hard as we have. The old adage however, is simply is not true.  On my clinical placements in physical and mental hospitals, I was continually overwhelmed by the fact that life can change in the blink of an eye.  Maybe you feel like your life has been turned upside down.  Who is God giving you access to?  Who are you now able to relate to?

In Mark 12:30-31, Jesus identifies “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” as the greatest commandment.  He follows this closely by identifying the second greatest commandment as, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”  Similarly, In Luke 10: 25-37 a lawyer asks Jesus what he needs to do to have eternal life.  Jesus asks the lawyer what the Law says, and the lawyer responds with these same two commandments.  When Jesus responds that following these two commandments will lead to eternal life, the lawyer counters by asking, “Who is my neighbour?”  Jesus answers with the parable of the Good Samaratin, telling the lawyer to “go and do likewise.”  In this parable, a neighbour was simply someone in need.  Likewise, in Matthew 25: 31-46, Jesus relates how the righteous will inherit the kingdom of God for feeding Him when He was hungry, clothing Him when He was naked and welcoming Him when He was a stranger. When the righteous are confused and ask when this happened, Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Jesus truly had a heart for the poor and suffering… do we? Just as Jesus reached out to you and me in our darkest hours of suffering, so he commands us to reach out to our neighbour.  I had a personal revelation when a friend suggested I read James 2.  Verses 15-17 say, “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?  So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” 

How many times had I glibly said ‘How are things going?’ to my teammates on the injured list without really listening?  How many times had I showed false compassion from the outside to a teammate who had been cut from the team without offering a real listening ear? The day I was officially cut from the 2010 team, I was sitting outside on a picnic table. I was waiting for my carpool, dreading the ride home, while the other successful athletes talked with the coach.  One of my teammates whom I had beaten in an earlier round of selection and had been cut before me, walked over and offered to drive me home.  I resisted, saying that I lived almost an extra 20 minutes past her house.  She told me that she didn’t care, and that she knew how terrible it must feel waiting for a ride when you just wanted to be home with your own thoughts.  She got it… she really understood. 

Since my experience of last year, I have been trying to keep an eye open to how I am relating to others around me, and praying that I am able to recognize opportunities to reach out.  Of course I fail all the time and get caught up in gossip and competition, but now I have an inside edge on understanding a more complete picture of the community of athletes with whom I train daily.   The great thing about Jesus, is that He reaches through us to others, just as we are.  Our individual struggles and triumphs uniquely situate us to relate to specific people in specific circumstances.  Likewise, our financial situation, social status, geography, education and a host of other factors strategically place us in a position to live out a faith that is alive.  This month, earnestly read James 2, and see if like me, God is challenging you to make an internal faith also an active faith.

 A test of our character is how we treat the people that we don’t need.”

~ Pastor Terry Sanderson