Readings for the Day:
Reflection:
This past winter, there was the tremendous victory in women's skating by Alysa Liu. 20 year-old Liu had what many termed a comeback. She had retired from skating at 16 after many international titles. Skating had lost its joy for her, and she did not want to continue on. She thought was the end of that chapter of her life for her.
Then a few things happened. She went on a sky trip with some friends, which helped her realize how much she missed skating. She started going back to the ring. This being at the time of the Pandemic, she was able to do so without a lot of other people around or a lot of attention.
She called up one of her old coaches and said she was thinking about skating again. Knowing what she had gone through, her coach tried to dissuade her. Eventually Liu was able to convince him to help with her return.
She convinced him because her approach to skating had changed. She wasn't about to bow to the pressure again. She was going to make the choices for her sets, down to the music and what she would wear. She wasn't going to restrict her diet so she had "just the right figure". For her, skating wasn't going to be like it was before. It was going to be about the joy she first found in it.
With all that pressure off, Liu did better than she ever had before. Just this past year, she won Gold at the Winter Olympics, the height of achievement for any athlete.
To do that, something had to change. Liu couldn't adhere to the strictness and control over her skating. She had to find the joy again.
We might even say she had to turn away from the law. That is something Paul speaks about from a Christian perspective in Philippians.
Just as Liu was perfect in her training as an athlete, Paul was perfect in his following of the Law. He was a Pharisee, the height of understanding the Law in his day and the spiritual forbearers not only of modern Judaism, but of Christianity as well. Paul was so focused on the Law that he even persecuted the early church.
Yet in the end, as Paul says, "whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord."
Paul continues by saying: "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of His sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus."
Alysa Liu had to change her approach to skating. It wasn't enough to push herself as an athlete. She had to find the joy in her sport as well.
Paul also had to shift his mindset, in his case to better connect with God. Yes, he had been a strict adherent to the Law, but it is only when he accepted the power of God in Jesus Christ that he fully developed that relationship.
In changing that mindset, Paul had to approach God in a different way. He had to keep going at it. He had to continue to practice, we might say. He had to keep pushing forward to "make it his own" just has "Christ Jesus" made him His own.
Our hope is to do the same. It may be we have to find that joy again. It may be our relationship with God needs a new spark. Like Paul, sometimes we need to take the time to make it our own, knowing that we will continue to strive forward, as did Paul, to the time that we are so close to God that we will have made it to the heavenly prize of being always present with our Lord.