Becoming An Olympic Athlete

We have to do something in order grow spiritually. What is it that we have to do? Over the past few weeks, our television screens were filled with images of the Winter Olympics in Italy. For example, you may have watched:

• Luge, where they speed down an icy track at 80-90 miles an hour on what looks like a Radio Flyer sled. Or skeleton, which is just as fast, except that they go head first, lying on their stomachs with their faces literally an inch or two off the ice. Anybody want to sign up for that? By the way, the sport of skeleton is called that because the sled they use is so minimal and bare-bones that it looks like a skeleton.

• Now curling, one of my favorite events, is the exact opposite of that. It’s very slow, basically shuffleboard on ice. But with Canadians shouting, “Curl, eh!”

• Of course, there’s figure skating, in which the skaters perform intricate routines to music, alone or in pairs, with jumps, and spins. Axels, Salchows, Lutzes, Toe loops. I’ll confess they all look the same to me. I can’t tell a double Axel from a triple Lutz—admit it, neither can you—but it’s very impressive nonetheless.

• There’s speed skating, where the athletes have thighs like tree trunks. Or short-track speed skating, which looks like barely controlled mayhem. It seems like half of those races end with the skaters all flying off the track and crashing into the barriers. And then the judges have to figure out who gets a medal. Fun times.

These events are all very different. Some of them can be very dangerous, as we saw when Lindsay Vonn crashed out ski racing. Others are pretty safe. Like curling. Maybe they risk a sprained ankle. Some of the athletic disciplines require precision, while others require strength, or endurance, or a complete lack of concern for personal safety. But what they all have in common is that they require many years, and thousands of hours, of practice. Thousands of reps on the squat rack at the gym. Thousands of miles of cross-country skiing. Thousands of hours repeating skating drills, or sweeping in front of the curling stone.

But here’s the key point: during those years, and those thousands of hours of training, there wasn’t any one day, or week, or month that made the difference, that made them into an Olympic athlete. It was the slow, steady, accumulation of skill and strength over time, little by little, day by day, that made them into what they are. Mikaela Shiffrin, who won a gold medal in this Olympics, isn’t the best slalom skier in history because she had a really intense workout one day back in December of 2017. No, Mikaela Shiffrin has won the most Alpine Ski World Cup victories ever, because she got up every day for years and went to the mountain, rode the ski lift up to the top, took a run down the slope, practiced her technique, maybe fell and got up, and then did it over, and over, and over, and over again.

And the same is true of spiritual growth. The same is true of the changes that God is making in us, with our cooperation. It’s the commitment to daily spiritual disciplines that make a huge difference over time.