Redefined

It should have been an easy question to answer, but for some reason it wasn’t.  It should have been doubly easy to answer, because I had asked the question.  I had asked the question of myself.  I had asked myself if I wanted to be better.

Did I want to be a better fighter?

It was a tougher question than it should have been.  I was already considered to be a decent fighter, at least decent enough.  I had trained with a few teams and had a lot of fights.  I was kind of a running joke because of the number of amateur fights I had.  Most fighters would have turned pro by then.  But I didn’t.  I was comfortable as an amateur.

I had been granted a couple of amazing opportunities at almost precisely the same time.  I had finally—at the insistence of one of my coaches—made the decision to become a professional MMA fighter.  I had filled out the paperwork and received an official ID.  It was going to be nice to get paid after years of fighting for free.

At the same time I had been introduced to a new coach.  He was considered one of the best coaches in the region.  His academy was a bit of a distance away and required a significant drive, so I had dropped in to train with him and his team when I could.  He was an excellent coach. I enjoyed training with his crew.  It was fun to drop in from time to time, and he was always generous.

Then I got a new job, and that new job required that I attend six weeks of training out of town.  My new employer footed the bill for a hotel.  Oddly, the hotel they housed me in was about half a mile away from this coach’s academy.  It was a strange coincidence.  I called him to let him know I would be in the area for an extended period.  He knew I was close to fighting my first professional fight, and he saw it as an opportunity to prepare.  He invited me to spend all those six weeks at his gym—a fight camp of sorts.

And now I was sitting in my truck outside of his academy asking myself if I really wanted to walk through those doors.  Did I really want to be a better fighter?

I knew how good a coach he was.  I’d trained with his team a few times and I’d even fought a couple of his fighters a while back.  I knew he could transform everything about the way I fought. 

That’s what frightened me, though.

I’d developed a serviceable reputation as a fighter.  I was a respected amateur.  I had credibility in the community.  I’d even signed a few autographs.  I was quite comfortable with being the sort of fighter I already was.

I knew he wanted to change everything about me.  He wanted to redefine me.

Those few sessions I had with him before had been great, and he had made it clear that he wanted to change several things about the way I fought.  He wanted my stance to be different, he wanted me to wrestle more, and he wanted to clean up some of my groundwork.

He wanted to redefine everything about me, because he wanted me to be better.  But I didn’t know if I wanted to do the work.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and look, new things have come.  (2 Corinthians 5:17) 

I’ve become rather comfortable with who I am.  I’ve found a way to make me work.  I have my strengths and I have my weaknesses.  I’ve come to a point in my life where I have enough insight to acknowledge both of those things—I can admit my weaknesses and recognize my strengths. 

I kind of like the way I am.

It’s not the best version of me.  It’s not the me I could be.  But it’s the me that I am, and the me that I am seems to serve the purpose it needs to serve.  I’ve survived this long, made it this far, and managed to get to where I am despite my best efforts.

In many ways I’ve worked hard to get to where I am and to become the person I am.  It wasn’t easy, either.  Getting here was costly and it didn’t come without a heavy price.  I’m an amalgam of memory and experience, carrying my wounds and displaying my scars with a certain sort of pride.

I’m kind of proud of those wounds.  They’ve given me a certain reputation.  They are part of my identity.

I don’t know that I want to move beyond them.

You took off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires; you are being renewed in the spirit of your minds;  you put on the new self, the one created according to God's likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth. (Ephesians 4:22-24) 

My first couple weeks of training camp were mind-numbingly boring, but they were also physically exhausting.  He wanted to change so much about the way I fought.  He narrowed my stance, because he felt it was too open.  He wanted me up on my toes and moving elusively rather than plodding forward like I tended.  He demanded that I hide behind my frames so I didn’t get hit as much.  I had a reputation for being able to take a punch and didn’t  mind getting hit—most of the time.  He hammered my wrestling fundamentals, forcing me to drill to the point of exhaustion, and then beyond the point of exhaustion.  I had been credited as a decent grappler—better than most I fought—so I had never really cared if I got taken down.  He insisted that I defend takedowns rather than giving them up.

It was overstimulating and brutally frustrating.  He was changing everything about me—about the way I moved, the way I strategized, and the way I thought about fighting.  As boring as the first few sessions were, things got worse when my training went live.  He started conscripting members of his (our) team to help, so that I would have opponents to work my new concepts against.   

It was a disaster.

I had habits.  I had versions of technique that had worked, and I kept reverting to them.  They weren’t the best techniques, but I had leaned on them many times.  Skilled as his fighters were, I could often find a way to make my inferior technique work—I was an experienced fighter in my own right.  I could absorb a couple punches, surrender a takedown, or give up a position to use my limited but practiced capabilities as a way to win exchanges.  I was trying to do things his way, but my body and my mind wanted to do it the way we already knew.  I kept returning to familiar tactics, even though I knew it was wrong—according to his standard. 

So he pulled on a pair of gloves and stepped into the mix.

That’s when things got worse.

I wasn’t executing technique the way he wanted—the way he demanded.  In my heart I knew that everything he was teaching me had a purpose.  It wasn’t just philosophy.  It was practical.  I could understand why he wanted me to stand a certain way, put my hands in a certain place, or move myself in a certain way.  But my body wasn’t buying in.  My mind refused to trust his changes and my form was displaying that lack of trust loudly.

I think he knew that.  He knew that I needed to learn to trust his instruction and he knew that somewhere in the back of my arrogant mind I needed to be convinced.  So he convinced me the hard way.  He started punishing my mistakes.  When I carried my hand too low, he cracked me right over the top of it.  When my stance opened too much he drilled me to the body.  When I surrendered the takedown he made sure I paid for the choice.

It was miserable, and it continued after that one night.  He took my training personally, in the most personal way possible.  We worked pads, we worked mitts, we drilled takedowns, and we hammered out repetitions on the ground.

“No,” he would bark, “not like that.  Do it again, but do it right!”

I could see the disapproval in his face.  He appeared angry, almost disgusted.  I imagined that he felt like he was wasting his time with a chump like me.  He was only training me as a favor to a friend and he didn’t seem to be enjoying it.  He didn’t seem to be enjoying me.

Sometimes I admit difficult things in this place of mine, and one of the most difficult things I will admit is that I struggle to trust my God.  I don’t believe He’s always on my side.  In a moment of full transparency I will acknowledge that I often don’t feel like God even likes me.

There are times—so many times—when I can’t help but feel like God has intentionally aligned Himself against me.  I feel like He’s punishing me or tormenting me.  My opinion of God is narrow and myopic, easily swayed by the emotion of whatever moment I am immediately experiencing.  The imminence of the now overruns the eminence of God’s presence.

I remind myself of Joshua, screaming at God with the absolute wrong questions.

When Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in His hand. Joshua approached Him and asked, "Are You for us or for our enemies?"

"Neither," He replied. "I have now come as commander of the LORD's army.  (Joshua 5:13-14) 

I know God is in charge.  I know it, but I don’t always like it.  I frequently don’t like it.  I struggle with trust.

I can’t always convince myself that He is for me.

My six weeks of out-of-town training ended, bring an artificial ending to my self-imposed fight camp.  I returned home to my new job and to my home teams (I was training with two other teams at the time, which is a separate story).  All of my training partners seemed happy that I had returned.  One of my other coaches advised that he had been talking with a local promoter about an upcoming fight card and my name had been mentioned.  I needed to stay sharp because my first professional fight might be coming sooner than we had expected.

Wednesday nights were hard practices in those days.  It had never been intentional, but it had become a thing for some reason.  We all knew that Wednesdays were hard rounds, and my first Wednesday back was no exception.

I warmed up and gloved up, stepping into the ring for what I knew was going to be a long night.  It was nice to be back home with a group of fighters I knew—who knew me.  We had been training together for some time and there was something comforting about the familiarity.  I think I preferred being beaten up by people I knew.

Warmup rounds finished quickly and we got into hard fight rounds.  It was a crowded house that night, so I had plenty of training partners to work with.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was having a good night—a really good night.  I had always been middle of the pack as far as skills—better than some but not as good as others.  But that night something changed.  My position on the team elevated drastically.

The guys who used to wreck me now feared me.  I started to receive grudging compliments for the way I was moving and the angles I was cutting.  I wasn’t so easy to hit anymore.  My defense was better and I was hitting takedowns nearly at will.  The training partners who had been so accustomed to bullying me around the ring just a few weeks before could no longer impose their will.

Everything about me was different, completely redefined.

My default image of God is not the loving, kind Creator that He promised.  My default image is a flawed—one of a vengeful, petty God who exists in a constant state  of disapproval toward me.  I can’t help but imagine that I’ve angered Him for the last time—that I’ve run out of chances.  Every love have its limits, and, for some reason, I assume that God’s love is the same as every other love I have known.

That’s my damage.

It feels like not so long ago during one of my sleepless nights—they come occasionally, though not frequently—that I reached out to one of the safest and most important people in my life.  I was struggling, struggling a lot.

I implored her, in my desperation, to tell me why God hated me.

My faith is far from perfect, and the image of God I hold in my heart is equally flawed.  I assume that God is mad at me.  I imagine that I’ve disappointed Him and messed everything up.

Truthfully, I probably have.  I’ve probably messed everything up.  I’ve most likely wrecked and ruined everything in my life that there is to wreck and ruin.

God’s love is nothing like any love I have ever known.  He’s not holding me to the standard that I’ve imposed on myself.  He refuses to limit Himself according to my damage.

Therefore, no condemnation now exists for those in Christ Jesus, because the Spirit's law of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. (Romans 8:1-2) 

There is something ecstatic about a hard-fought win.  The time had finally come for me to put my professional status to the test.  The promotion had found me a tough opponent.  I was going to have to earn it, and I knew it.  My new coach made the trip to be there in my corner—he was there with my regular coach and a couple of my primary training partners.  My opponent came to fight.  He made me earn my victory.

It was a beautiful feeling to win in front my coaches, team, family, and friends.  I walked out of that cage with a joy dangerously close to the edge of tears.  My coaches and my corner shared my joy—there’s something inexplicably beautiful about that.

The expression of disapproval I had so many times imagined to be on my newest coach’s face was no longer there—I don’t know that it ever had been.  He was smiling even as he cut the wraps off of my hands.

“That long jab was beautiful,” he declared.  “I knew it was going to pay off for you—right into the body-lock like we practiced.”

As he finished removing  the handwraps he reached out to embrace me—and that’s when I noticed something for the first time.  It was something that should have been obvious, but my brain is quite addled and can be easily clouded by external factors.

As my coach embraced me I noticed that we were built nearly identically.  We fought at the same weight, were the same height, both had long arms and long legs.  I realized that he had spent all this time teaching me to fight like him.  He had been teaching me to fight in the most effective way possible for someone like me, because I was someone like him.

He hadn’t been trying to redefine me.  He hadn’t wanted to transform me into something different than I was.  He had been refining me into the best version of what I could be.  He had been vying to highlight the best things about me while addressing the weaknesses inherent in being me.

He wasn’t redefining me.  He was refining me.

For we are His creation, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we should walk in them.  (Ephesians 2:10) 

I can know things but still struggle to own them—like knowing that my God loves me because He created me to be someone He loves.  He’s rescued me from myself more times than I can remember, and I don’t even know  the times He rescued me without me knowing.  The score is much higher than I can know.  My mind isn’t capable of understanding numbers like that.

I often can’t determine if the pressure I feel is God’s refining or if it’s the natural consequence of my own decisions.  Maybe it’s both.  God is more than capable of using my errors as a tool for my betterment.  Sometimes He cheats like that.  After all, He makes the rules and loves to bend them in my favor.  He bends them toward me because of His great love for me.

For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we will live together with Him. (1 Thessalonians 5:9-10)