Resistance

There’s something in me—something about me—that loves to fight.  I love the challenge and I love the confrontation.  I love the process—the misery of training camp and the joy of small victories that are found in exhaustion.  I love the camaraderie of hard rounds with teammates aned the mutually agreed destruction of for the betterment of one another.  I love the way the fight hones me and sharpens me and makes me stronger.

I love fighting.

I love to fight.

And I can’t stop fighting.

I can’t stop fighting against God.

There is a song we sing in my church (I’m sure it’s sung in many other churches, too), and one of the lines speaks (sings) of God’s goodness, and the line states, “your goodness is running after me.”

I was singling this recently, and a picture of myself came to mind.  It was a vision of God running after me, chasing me with His goodness.  For some reason I’m running away. I’m running away from all the goodness that God has for me.

I can’t stop running from Him.

I can’t stop resisting Him.

I can’t stop wrestling against God.

Jacob wrestled against God, too.  Jacob fought against God while demanding that God give him (Jacob) a blessing that Jacob already owned.

Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.  When the man saw that He could not defeat him, He struck Jacob's hip socket as they wrestled and dislocated his hip.

Then He said to Jacob, "Let Me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob said, "I will not let You go unless You bless me." (Genesis 32:24-26) 

I think I get it, at least a little bit.  God is God.  He could have wrecked Jacob at any time.  It wasn’t that could not “defeat” Jacob during their match.  It’s that Jacob wouldn’t recognize that God could defeat Him.  Jacob wouldn’t stop fighting against God, even though God had nothing but good things waiting for Jacob.  Jacob’s striving was leading to his own destruction and God was fighting to save Jacob from Jacob’s own resistance.

It’s confusing, but I totally get Jacob.  I, too, like to fight against God, even when He is doing everything He can to give me what I need.  I have a tendency to fight for the sake of fighting.

My coach and I had worked on my footwork and my stance for hours and hours over a period of several weeks.  To be honest, it had been kind of boring and repetitive.  But I did what he said to do because he was my coach.  I’d stood and stared at myself in the mirror while I moved sideways, forward, and backward and shadowboxed jabs and crosses and hooks.  He wanted me to fight with a shallower stance to protect my center line—I had previously been trained to stand with more of an “open” stance that he felt minimized my movement and left me unprotected.  He wanted me to keep my elbows tighter to my body and my chin tucked deeper.  He wanted to change everything about the way I stood and moved.

Like so often happens, when I had graduated from drills to actual sparring, I quickly reverted to the habits I had previously developed.  My stance opened back up and I continued moving the old way I had been taught rather than the new way I was supposed to be learning.

I could hear him yelling at me from the edge of the mats—get my elbows in, get my trail foot back, stop circling and cut angles.  He was yelling for me to do all of the things that we had been training for the past several weeks, but my body—and my mind—were refusing to embrace the new concepts. 

I wasn’t doing it out of intention.  I was doing it out of habit.  My body was resisting this new approach.  I couldn’t make myself do what he was telling me to do.  Now that I was under pressure I couldn’t make myself buy into this new way of doing things.  I reverted to the style I already knew.

I was good enough at doing it my old way that I could be somewhat successful.  I was just as good as anyone else on those mats and my old habits were paying off just fine.  I was landing good punches and solid kicks.  My takedowns and takedown defense were working just fine.  My mind and body couldn’t find a reason to do it the way my coach said to do it, because things were working just fine the way they were.

So he decided to fix it himself.

I probably should have taken notice when he put on his gloves and shin guards, but it happened too quickly.  The round ended and suddenly he was standing in front of me, ready to be my next sparring partner.  He had my next round.

I was game.  There was a part of me that wanted to prove to him that I was a good fighter—that I was worth his effort.  There might have been a little ego involved, too.  I might have been a bit resentful at his insistence on changing everything about the way I had been taught to fight.

We touched gloves and I decided to rely on the jab, using my long reach to keep him just out of range.  That didn’t last long at all.  I snapped a straight jab and he simply slipped a little bit out of the way, stepped sharply to close the distance, and chopped a short right at my chin.  I was smart enough to keep my hands up, so the punch glanced off my gloves and I turned to counter with a right hand of my own.

It was exactly what he had expected.  He knew exactly what I was going to do and he was ready.

Effortlessly, he adjusted his feet, stepped just a little offline, and dug a biting left hand to my liver…

…anyone who has ever fought knows the terror of the liver punch. 

It landed with a wet, slapping sort of noise, and I knew, even before the pain registered, what was coming.  There was a slight delay before the pain in my nerve endings reached my brain.  When it did it did it did so with a vengeance—every pain receptor decided to light up at the same time.  I crumbled to the mat as the dark anguish flooded into my consciousness.

But he wasn’t done. 

“Get up,” he told me as he backed away, “we’ve got a lot of the round left to go.”

I forced myself to my feet with pure force of will.  He was ready to start again, but I was not.  He didn’t care.  He started moving again and I could see it in his eyes—this was a serious sparring match. 

I was still trying to recover from the sting of that last blow.  The pain had subsided slightly, allowing me limited access to my own intelligence.  I knew I didn’t want him to close the gap again—I couldn’t allow him to get close and drop another punch like that last one.  So I opted to keep him at length and out of punching range.  I opened up my stance so that I could kick better.

It didn’t matter.  I had done exactly what he expected, again.

Smoothly, he shifted his feet and flicked out a seemingly harmless kick from his lead leg.

The effect didn’t come from the speed, or the power.  It came from the target, which happened to be my liver—the same liver that would have been protected had I been standing in the stance I had been refusing to embrace.  It was also the same liver he’d dropped me with just seconds earlier.

The kick didn’t land hard, it didn’t land fast, and it didn’t land strong.  It just landed perfectly.

It folded me in half.

I collapsed to the mat once more, my breath coming in short gasps as I clutched gloved hands to my right side, trying to suppress the painful spasms.

He stood above me and waited while I recovered enough to finally look up.  I found his eyes there waiting for me.  His face wasn’t angry, but neither was it impassive.  It just looked like it wanted to ask me a question, so he did.

“Are you ready to learn now?”

I couldn’t speak through my ragged breaths, so I just nodded.

“You can hang with these guys by doing what you’ve always done,” he told me, “but that’s not what I’m training you for.  I’m getting you ready to fight real fighters.  I need you to do it the way I tell you to.”

I recently had a conversation about this with a friend.  It’s been on my mind a lot of late.  I know that I fight against God and I don’t know if I know how to stop.  My tendency to fight is a force of habit.

I asked my friend, “is it possible to fight against God and come away unwounded?”

There was no hesitation in his answer. 

“No.”

Jacob fought against God and he walked with a limp.

The sun shone on him as he passed by Penuel—limping because of his hip. (Genesis 32:31) 

I think I might know how Jacob felt.  I know what it’s like to limp.  The remnants of my life choices live loudly in my body—the memory of the heel-hook I should have tapped earlier to, the pain in my shoulder from the hard falls during wrestling practice, the knuckle on my right hand that has never been right since the first time I broke it.  The physical injuries are easy to feel.  I imagine that if watch me long enough you’d discover that they are also easy to see.

For all the times I’ve wrestled with God I know I’ve taken damage.  I walk with a spiritual limp of sorts, and that spiritual injury, I think, is far more obvious than my physical limitations.  It manifests itself through emotional dysregulation, unhealthy life habits, and a certain instability.  Because my emotional and physical selves are so intrinsically connected to my spiritual self I have no way to untangle the damages.  My spiritual wounds impact every aspect of my existence.

When I run from God—when I make the choice to wrestle against Him—I charge directly into the waiting arms of death and destruction.  When I separate myself from my creator and my purpose there is nothing but pain waiting.  Sometimes, it seems, God finds a way to minimize my resistance.  It’s never too much, but it’s always enough.  Sometimes the enough hurts—it hurts because it has to. 

The goodness that God chases me with is not a trifling thing.  It’s not the hollow, saccharine version of happiness that I find in media, or in books, or in the deep recesses of my own imagination.  It is the truest of goodness.  It is life and  life abundantly.

And still I fight against it.

Yet God is not willing to let me go.  He’s tethered to my heart and conjoined to my soul.  No matter how hard I fight, the moment I pause my resistance I will find myself staring so hard into his eyes that I can see my own reflection in the pupil.  There he is, waiting with arms outstretched and full of life, purpose, and peace—all of the things I keep running from and fighting against.

Even in those moments when I understand, it is my nature to fight.  I just can’t make myself stop fighting.  I don’t want to let go of the habits and routines that have served my satisfaction so well.  Those things are comfortable even when they are deadly.

But God is not the sort of God who is willing to let me resist myself into destruction.  He wants me to be better than I am.  He’s like my coaches—like them, but so much better.  He’s preparing me to fight the real enemy and the way I fight right now is not enough.  I need to be able to fight better.

God could defeat me at any time, just like He could have defeated Jacob.  He doesn’t have to fight me very hard, because I wear out quickly.  When I finally stop fighting against His goodness—usually out of some form of hurt or exhaustion—I find myself finally willing to be taught.  I guess I learn best by learning the hardest way possible.

When I finally find myself crumpled on the floor in pain, that’s the place where I can finally receive all of that goodness that God is offering.  I don’t have the capacity to fight it anymore.  I don’t have that kind of strength.

It is still my nature to close my hands into fists—my hands know well how to close into fists.  I strive to resist the beautiful things God wants to place there, but when my resistance has failed I have nothing left to fight with.  There, in my pain and fatigue, maybe I can find myself willing to finally receive what God is offering.  Maybe I can learn to open my hands.

My coach’s actions were not the actions of a man who hated me.  They were the actions of a man who loved me in a way that only fighters understand.  He knew he needed to find a way through my resistance and that, sometimes, that way is through a gentle wounding.  He knew what he was preparing me for and he knew what was on the line.  He needed to help me learn to listen.

How much more my God?

God is not scared of my resistance.  He welcomes it.  When I struggle with Him—or struggle against Him—He blesses my opposition.  He finds a way to turn it to my favor, because He knows how to teach me.

I’m still learning to be better at being taught.

"Your name will no longer be Jacob," He said. "It will be Israel because you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed."  (Genesis 32:28)