UKRANIAN OLYMPIC ATHLETES TRAINING FOR THIS YEAR'S OLYMPICS
A couple of years ago I met someone in the Safeway store that I remembered used to attend Bear Creek UMC. It was so good to see her! We were both in the checkout line, so I asked her if she’d care to have a coffee with me at the Starbucks in the store. She hesitated for a minute and then agreed. As we sat together, I inevitably came around to sharing with her that we all missed her at church and that we’d all love to have her come back. It was then that she got a tear in her eye and looked down. “Pastor Brook don’t get this wrong. I love Bear Creek, and I love you, it’s just that I have pretty much given up on all that.” I paused for a moment wondering if I should just leave it at that. I mean I get it. It’s not easy to believe in God these days. She wouldn’t be the first person to give up on the concept of a loving God. But I finally pressed on and asked, “Give up on what?” And this time she started to outright weep as she shared, “On me. I have tried and tried for years to improve; you know. Get better. Let God take my struggles and help me redeem them. But I’m still stuck here in the very same spot I started. I’ve just given up on me.” We talked more of course. But in the end, that’s where we left it.
In essence, her crisis of faith was one of losing faith in herself.
In the book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller says that every story is like paddling a rowboat to an island. When you first start, you feel like you’re making a lot of progress. The shore recedes quickly, and the island feels so close you can touch it. But once you get out into open water, its easy to think you’re not even moving. The shore you just left seems far away and the island you’re going to isn’t getting any closer. You’re not making any progress, and you start to wonder if you should just give up.
To be frank, this is a feeling I often get while writing. I have no problem starting a story or a sermon. And I don’t have a hard time finishing them. But the middle of those sermons or articles is a story graveyard, littered with the corpses of some pretty ugly sermons.
Miller continues in his book to say that the key to finishing is to keep going. If you keep going almost miraculously, the opposite shore appears. You’re almost there. You can tell you’re just a few paddle strokes from land. Just don’t give up in the “Ugly Middle.” The breakthrough will always come just after the hardest part. Too many great stories never get written because people don’t work past the “ugly middle.”
One of the greatest stories in this year’s Paris Olympics wasn’t the American gymnastics team (even though it was incredible) but the story of the Ukrainian Men’s Olympic gymnastics team. As you know, Ukraine is in the middle of an incredibly ugly and evil invasion by Putin and the Russians. Daily Ukrainian citizens have to leave their homes and huddle in bomb shelters until the all-clear whistle is given. Here is how one Ukrainian describes it.
“There were about five or six months that I couldn’t properly train because of the situation. It’s getting better. We’re getting back on track. It used to be that we had three to five incoming threat alerts daily–-when rockets fly to Ukraine—and each time we’d have to go down to the basement and wait it out. We would have to stop for one hour, then go back.”
Talk about ugly in the middle! I think if I would have had a choice, I would have left Ukraine to train elsewhere. Somewhere in the US, maybe? Well, they were offered that chance! But believe it or not the Ukrainian Men’s team made a conscious choice to stay. They wanted to be in solidarity with so many Ukrainians who didn’t have a choice to leave. They wanted people in the rest of the world to be confronted with the “ugly truth” when they went to compete in other competitions around the world. They wanted to show the world and their own people, that they could overcome this, and if they could overcome this...then so could the people back home. They were determined to keep rowing through the ugly middle of this thing.
The thing we don’t realize is that they almost didn’t make it to the Olympics. Their team was the 12th team to qualify for the Olympics this year. And only 12 teams qualify. They defeated the Brazilian team by 166 thousandths of a point to win the last spot.
And as we all celebrated the USA’s first team medal in the men’s team competition in over 20 years, what we didn’t see was a Ukrainian team that just missed the podium.
But in my rating system, they would have been given the gold for the best story of this year’s Olympics. A story made even more miraculous because of the ugly middle they all continue to overcome.
Your friend and pastor, still rowing with all of you through the “ugly middle” to get to the finish line, Brook
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