What my first track season taught me about listening to God
Sports have always been part of my life. I’ve played volleyball since I was eight or nine. But it wasn’t until the spring of this past year that I tried track for the first time.
At first, I had a lot of doubts. I wondered, “Should I even be here? Is it helpful to the team that I’m here?” It was hard to be in an environment where everyone was more advanced than I was.
I also put a lot of pressure on myself when it came to my races. I’m a sprinter, and I started out running the 100-meter dash. During my second 100-meter race, I really wanted to PR (get a new personal record). And my coach told me that if I shaved about a second off my time, he’d put me in more events. So I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to go faster.
The day of the event, I was on the starting line, waiting for the gun to go off, but I was so anxious to start that I took off before the gun and was disqualified. It was my only event of the day, so I was crushed.
I took off before the gun and was disqualified.
I realized I needed to change the way I was approaching things. As a Christian Scientist, I grew up reading the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and there are ideas in both books that helped me a lot with anxiety.
In the Bible, there’s a story that mentions “a still small voice” (I Kings 19:12), which I understand to refer to God. That made me more aware that any thoughts of anxiety, pressure, or personal responsibility couldn’t be coming from God. God is the source of that feeling of love that comes to you when you put your fears aside and listen for the first calming thought.
I started to understand that God is always speaking to us. His thoughts of peace, calm, and goodness are always there. Psalm 139 in the Bible says: “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand” (verses 17, 18).
I realized that the only thing that could stand in the way of my hearing all those good thoughts was being focused on myself or my fears about not doing well. And I wanted to hear what God was saying, because God’s thoughts always give us the steady guidance we need to do our best.
In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy says that understanding that God is good is the basis of our practice of Christian Science. I’ve been discovering that good is such a helpful name for God because it’s like a dividing line between the thoughts that don’t come from God and the ones that do. God is only good. So I like to think of God’s thoughts as the “good news.” Ideas from God are anything that lifts your thought up from where it has been. In Psalms it says, “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (61:2). That became a way I recognized which thoughts I should listen to before and during my race: only the ones that took me higher.
This proved very practical in the 4x1 relay I was part of. I was the second leg of the relay, and I’d had a tendency to leave too early for my teammate running behind me to catch up. One time, I even left the exchange zone without the baton and had to run back, which added time to our race. I was really disappointed in myself. I felt like I didn’t know how to succeed.
But I kept praying and learning how to rely on God for what to do. By the last 4x1 of the season, I was able to wait just as long as I needed to in order to get the baton, and it was a very smooth handoff. Though our team didn’t medal in that event, I was very grateful to have learned that I could listen to God even in the middle of a race and learn how to be calm under pressure. I discovered that I could always just ask God, “What should I focus on right now?” His answers always come with such simplicity.
I could listen to God even in the middle of a race and learn how to be calm under pressure.
I found that I did have a place on the team and a reason for being there. But it wasn’t because of what I was doing or what times I was getting; it was because of how I was doing it. One of my favorite hymns begins, “Shepherd, show me how to go” (Mary Baker Eddy, Poems, p. 14). It reminds me that as God is guiding our actions, He is also showing us how to do them. For me, this meant praying for myself and my teammates and finding things to be grateful for at each meet. I enjoyed cheering on and supporting my teammates when they won races or broke their personal records.
Track has taught me that an important question to ask is, “How should I do whatever I’m doing in the right way?” I know now that if God has led you somewhere, it doesn’t stop there. He’s going to keep leading you and showing you how to be in that place. And what that ends up looking like might not be what you thought. But it’s going to be the biggest blessing to you and everyone around you, just like it was for me on the track team.
