The Day Her Body Stopped Keeping Time.

We were sitting at a table to discuss terms. 

Tournaments, travel, and schedules which are part of the ordinary language of a professional season. Yet, before any of that could begin she told me something quietly that had nothing to do with tennis, though it impacted it.

Her cycle had disappeared six months earlier.

I have learned to listen carefully to what a body says when a person has run out of words. A body that stops keeping time is not being difficult. It is telling the truth about a life that has stopped keeping rhythm.

Twenty one days without a single day off

I asked her how she had been training before this first meeting. She told me that the coach she had been working with did not believe in rest. Their preseason had run twenty one days in a row without one day off. No pause, no breath, and no permission to stop.

Here was a young woman with tremendous potential sitting in front of me completely burnt out and unable to win a match. What made it more painful was what the losing had done inside her. 

The more she lost the more convinced she became that something was wrong with her and so the harder she tried. She was literally pouring effort into the very thing that was emptying her.

In my years on the Pro Tour I watched this pattern more times than I can count. The great secret of high performance was never the intensity of the training block. It was the quality of the recovery that sat beside it. 

Rest was never the reward for the work. 

Rest was part of the work.

So we built a different way. 

A training method designed to help her recover simultaneously her emotions, mind, and body because a human being does not come apart into sections that can be repaired one at a time.

Two months into that program her period returned like clockwork. Two months after that she made history as the first player from her region of the World to reach the Quarter Finals of a Grand Slam.

Nothing had been added to her talent. Something had simply been given back to her.

The same system in a different building

I think about her often when I look back on my own and other peoples spiritual journey.

In the earlier days of discovering the presence of God in my life I walked straight into a religious system that mirrored the very reality she had been living in. Every time I made a mistake the answer was to try harder and do more. 

Every struggle had to be hidden so that appearances could be kept. People were told they were loved unconditionally while quietly being measured on their performance.

It was the twenty one day preseason wearing different clothes.

Yeshua never promised a permanent holiday. He promised something far more interesting than that. He promised a reality where the work continues while the soul stays at rest and where effort and inner peace live in the same body at the same time.

In all three of these places, with the player, with me, and with the crowd Yeshua was speaking to, the incessant effort was hiding the same thing underneath it. We were all trying to make the grade. 

We had each been shown a standard that had to appear in our lives before we were allowed to relax and enjoy what had already been given to us.

Rest had become something to be earned rather than something to be received.

Sleep is for the weak!

Rest, unfortunately, is deeply unpopular in the world we live in.

I once saw a bumper sticker that read sleep is for the weak, I will sleep when I am dead. I understand the bravado in it. Yet, I am afraid that people who live that way often find themselves sleeping far earlier than they were ever meant to.

The cost is not only physical. 

This same way of living quietly destroys relational space. People arrive into our homes, our workplaces, and our communities and are met with conditions and expectations rather than love and acceptance. 

The room becomes another arena where the grade must be made. Sadly nobody exhales in a room like that.

It is also why so many believers would rather learn what the Bible says than feel the life of God flowing through them unconditionally. 

Learning and knowledge can be measured. Being loved without qualification cannot and that is far more frightening to a heart that has only ever known evaluation.

The rhythm returns

I have never forgotten the look on that young woman's face when her body began keeping time again. She had not become stronger. She had been allowed to stop proving.

Her results followed her rest. They did not produce it.

Ask yourself honestly today what you are still trying to earn before you give yourself permission to stop. 

Then consider the possibility that it was given to you a long time ago, and that the only thing standing between you and the rest you were made for, is the belief that you have not yet done enough.

Your body keeps an honest record. 

How about you also let it start keeping time again?

With you on the journey,

PS See you next Sunday