It doesn’t depend on you

When I was in high school, I participated in a wrestling camp at a top university. It was really tough! One of the toughest moments was one evening when my group was required to run punishment drills—for something we hadn’t done. Starting off with a hefty dose of resentment, we proceeded to run stairs in the university’s football stadium. Then it was on to the track, where we were required to run laps until each runner had come in first on one of the laps. Ours was a big group; I was not nearly the fastest; and this whole thing was extremely disheartening for me. 

The words from that hymn were like cool water poured over me, and they just filled me up with their own power.

I was used to turning to God in prayer when things were challenging, so I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to pray during this terrible evening. Maybe I was so caught up in the unfairness of it that the anger occupied all my attention. Or maybe I was so focused on mustering all the personal power I thought I possessed that I forgot about God’s power. In any case, I was quite surprised when I was on my seventh lap, crying and about to collapse, and words from a favorite hymn came flooding into my thought: “O dreamer, leave thy dreams for joyful waking, / O captive, rise and sing, for thou art free” (Rosa M. Turner, Christian Science Hymnal, No. 202, © CSBD). Those words were like cool water poured over me, and they just filled me up with their own power. I didn’t try to apply these encouraging words to my hard experience; I just let them carry me. And I went from being entirely beaten one moment to running freely and fully the next.