Wrecked

It was a good day for a drive.  I’d decided it was a good day for a drive, at least.  There was a little flexibility in my schedule that day, so I took advantage of the unexpected time with some training with my MMA coach and his team.  It was about an hour’s worth of driving—depending on the traffic—and it had been relatively smooth.

I arrived a little early, because I have a tendency to be the sort of guy who arrives early.  I waited around as members of the team started to show.  They were early, too.  It was a nice day, and we were all lingering outside of the academy while we waited for our coach to unlock the doors.  Apparently, he was running late, but that didn’t bother us.  It was a nice day, and we were enjoying the sun while we waited.

One of the guys looked at the truck I was driving, then at me.  “How long did it take you to drive here?”

“Oh,” I shrugged, “about an hour.”

“What kind of mileage does that get?”

Gas wasn’t as expensive then as it is now, but it wasn’t cheap.  My truck didn’t have the best efficiency, but neither did it have the worst.  It was just my truck.  It’s what I drove.

“I don’t know.  Maybe 14 or 16 miles per gallon.”

“That can’t be cheap,” he frowned.  “Seems expensive to make your way up to us.  What would make you drive all that way?”

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but now I did.  Why was I willing to sacrifice time and money to drive all the way up here to train with this team when I had a great team of my own only minutes from my house?  My team was great.  They were family and they were home.  But I frequently made it a point to take this drive to train with this other team and with this other coach.

I looked at the guy I was talking to.  He was a Golden Gloves boxer with some of the fastest hands I had ever encountered.

Next to him was one of the best wrestlers I had ever met, an absolute athlete who earned his credentials at one of the most prestigious wrestling colleges in the nation.

One of the other fighters was a phenom on the ground.  His Jiu-jitsu skills were light years beyond mine.

Every one of these athletes—the ones  arrived and the ones I knew were on the way—were better than me.  They were better boxers, better grapplers, better wrestlers, and, in general, better fighters.  Our coach—who I knew as on the way—was better at all the things than any of us were.

Everyone in this mix was better than me and I knew they were better than me.  Every time I showed up to train, they absolutely wrecked me.  They were that much better.  And I learned.  I learned so much from being wrecked.  It was the best way I learned.

I knew they were going to wreck me, and I knew my trip would be worth the effort.  That’s why I made the drive.

I have an arrogant streak in me, but I’m also fragile and frail.  I imagine those aspects of my personality are intrinsically connected.  One is a defense against the other, and I can’t always tell which is protection and which is malfunction.  Humility isn’t natural to me.  It isn’t natural, but I well know that it’s necessary.  I don’t know how to embrace humility, but I do know how to embrace the things I know will humble me.

I don’t always want to seek humility, but I do know how.  The route to humility is simple.  It’s not easy, but it is simple.  The route to humility is surrender.  I must surrender myself—flaws and all—to the loving God who promised the best for me.

Seek the LORD, all you humble of the earth, who carry out what He commands. Seek righteousness, seek humility; perhaps you will be concealed on the day of the LORD's anger. (Zephaniah 2:3) 

My best—the best version of me—is still far in the distance.  There’s too much of me in the way.  My ego is fighting a desperate battle for constant domination over the essence of who I am.  It is seeking to define everything about my choices and beliefs.  My ego absorbs the self-defined form of my personality.  It tells me silly things like “this is just who I am” and “I’ve been this way for too long just to change now.”

But God doesn’t want that for me, and He doesn’t want me to want that for me.  He doesn’t want me to be OK with a lesser version of the me  He created me to be.

He wants to wreck me and crush every misconception of what I’ve allowed my failed self to become.  I tend to cling desperately to my ego—out of fear and out of pure stubbornness.  But my ego has nothing of value to offer.  It’s a shield against who I am meant to be, a shield that I am wielding out of choice and out of habit.  It’s a shield between me and the better things I was meant for.

I don’t desire humility, but I crave it.  I know I need it, even though I know I don’t want it.  Humility is a process filled with discomfort and even suffering of a sort.  It is a separation of me from the inferior thing I’ve allowed me to believe I am.

My wounds are foul and festering because of my foolishness.  I am bent over and brought low; all day long I go around in mourning. (Psalms 38:5-6) 

I don’t always want to seek humility, but I do know how.

It’s one of the reasons I compete—one of the many reasons.  It is no small thing to make myself face a capable opponent and to do it before the eyes of my family, friends, team, and complete strangers.  It’s a huge risk to my ego.  My every flaw and shortcoming could be revealed and I could be exposed as a fraud and incompetent.  It’s no small thing to me.  But it’s a way to force myself into humility.

I don’t always want to seek humility, but I do know how.

I think I need to be wrecked from time to time.  I need to be destroyed to the point where there’s nothing left but the essence of what God created me to be.  I’ve built so many shrouds and protections around my authentic (real) self that I easily ignore the true design of who I’m striving to become.

I am given the opportunity to surrender and give God authority in my life—and authority He already owns but refuses to assert.  I implore Him, in desperation, to shine a light into the deepest recesses and corners of my existence.  I give Him permission to expose what needs to be discarded and left behind.  God could do it on His own.  He could force the issue, but He chooses not to.

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my concerns.  See if there is any offensive way in me; lead me in the everlasting way. (Psalms 139:23-24) 

I love rounds like these.  They’re good for my body and for my mind, but in a bad sort of way. He’s one of my toughest sparring partners—big, strong, and technical.  He and I have been training with each other for years, and every match is physically demanding.  He’s good at Jiu-jitsu, and I’m not so bad at it.  Our rounds are always epic.

We’re deep into the match—nobody bothered to set a timer, so it will end when it’s done.  I was able to escape his mount and catch a quick reversal.  It cost me some energy.  He didn’t make it easy.  I had to fight for every inch.  Now I’m in his guard, but guard-passing is one of my strengths as a grappler.  I think I have a slight edge on him here.

He’s locked down my foot to prevent the knee-cut.  He’s holding it like a vice and I’m driving my hips to the mat in an effort to free it.  I’ve got enough pressure on him that I’m hindering his movement, but he’s skilled and maintaining composure.  He won’t let go of my foot, and I can’t complete the pass.

From my position in the center of this battle, a thought enters my mind.  From where I am—from where he is—I could easily back-step and initiate a leg-entanglement.  I’ve drilled it a number of times.  I know how to do it.  I catch quite a few of the lower-ranks with it.

But there is a problem.  He’s better at legs than I am.  I have an advantage in the guard-passing realm, I think, but I know he’s better at lower-body submissions than me.

He’s got all kinds of good leg entries.  He’s got bolos and reverse De La Riva attacks and a hundred other ways to get to my  knees and ankles.  My leg game is weak. I know it’s weak. I know he’s better than me in that area.  If I initiate the entanglement, I might be able to threaten him for a moment, but that moment will fade quickly.  He’ll crush me with leg submissions.  I should probably focus on the upper body part of Jiu-jitsu where I have the advantage.

That wouldn’t teach me anything, though.  I have to be willing to be crushed.  I have to be willing to be humbled.  I might even have to be willing to be humiliated.

He’s a good training partner.  We always train hard, but he’s never seeking to hurt me.  He and I have control enough to challenge each other without causing permanent damage.  This is an opportunity for me to grow my skillset and surrender to someone else’s expertise.

It’s a poor choice as far as tactics go, but I can’t help but smile as I hit my backstep into the Honey Hole leg entanglement.  I think he’s surprised, because he laughs just a little bit as he easily nullifies my threat.  He’s going to wreck me here, but I’m going to come out better for it.

I know there will be pain associated with the process.  Threshing is difficult.  Paring away useless attachments is a surgery of sorts, and surgery is never painless.

There comes a time—there has come a time—when I can no longer ignore the weight of foolish bonds.  I know it is time to be rid of them.  And I am afraid, because I know journey will be difficult and painful.  It has to be.  That’s the nature of growth.  Everything requires a crushing to grow, and crushing is inherently uncomfortable.  Changing what I have wrongly convinced myself is the core of who I am will be difficult, but it is necessary.

And you have forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons: My son, do not take the Lord's discipline lightly or faint when you are reproved by Him, for the Lord disciplines the one He loves and punishes every son He receives. (Hebrews 12:5-6) 

It was a random text from an individual that I didn’t much care for.  It simply read, “can I come train with you tonight?”

I didn’t know him well—just enough in passing—but I did know that his own team was struggling.  I decided to embrace generosity despite my personal feelings for him.

“Sure,” I replied, “come on in.  We start at 6.”

He did come in, which was a slight surprise to me.  He had a reputation for being a bit on the flaky side with his commitments.

“What are looking to train tonight?” I asked after he stepped onto mats.  “We were planning to start with stand-up for the first hour, then work on grappling drills for the second hour.”

“Well,” he kind of drew out his answer, which seemed to indicate that the answer wasn’t as easy as it should be, “I accepted a title fight in Alaska in two weeks.”

“Congratulations,” I replied, slightly confused by his hesitation, “sounds like a great opportunity.”

“Not really,” he told me.  “I just need to get a few rounds in.  None of my own team is showing up to train.  My opponent is really good, and I know I’m going to lose.  But I need the money, so I agreed to take the fight.”

“You know you’re going to lose?” I was even more confused now.

“Yeah, he’s going to crush me, but at least I’ll get paid.”

It’s easy for me to think nothing but terrible things about myself amid the crushing.  I weight myself with self-criticism and despair.  Change is a slow burn and the burn can singe me in a way that causes me to look at my deficits and failures as if they were features of my very existences.  My mistakes threaten to overwhelm me to the point of despair.

That’s not what they are to my God.  Certainly, my failures are failures in my eyes, but in God’s eyes they are so much more.  They are moments outside of time that exist briefly inside of this time where I am stranded.  They are opportunities and inspiration toward something different and something better than now.

My fight is not a fight without hope.  I often struggle with hopelessness, I admit.  I struggle to hope because I struggle to trust and I struggle to trust because my faith is weak.  Fortunately, God doesn’t need my faith to be strong.  He’s filling in those gaps even while we’re doing the hard work I don’t usually want to do.

For though we live in the body, we do not wage war in an unspiritual way, since the weapons of our warfare are not worldly, but are powerful through God for the demolition of strongholds. We demolish arguments and every high-minded thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, taking every thought captive to obey Christ.  (2 Corinthians 10:3-5) 

Without a tearing down there can be no rebuilding.  Old things cannot exist in the same space as new things, so the old thing must be crushed into dust and blown away.  It is a brutal procedure wrought with anxiety.

My thoughts grow unfettered and turn toward cruelty—cruelty toward myself  and all of my shortcomings.  My thoughts lie to me and they fight against me.  They tell me that, in the midst of all of this wreckage, I will never build enough to be better than I was when I started.  I condemn myself and I condemn others for the way they condemned me to myself.  I convince myself that I am doomed because I am me.

And my God knows this about me.  He knows this about me because He knows me.

So He whispers in my ear.  He whispers in my ear that He is going to wreck me again, but He is going to wreck me in a beautiful way.  He is going to wreck me in a way that is so beautiful that I will begin to recognize the beauty of where I am now and where I am going to be.

It’s one of my tougher nights, a difficult night among a litany of difficult nights.  My mind is the busy place that it always seems to be.  It is relentless and merciless.  It does not have my best intention at heart.  It is full of condemnation and self-critique.  I am living in my failures again, just like I have before.

I choose to make a good decision, one that is contrary to my usual instinct.  I have a natural affinity for isolation and hiding.  It’s a thing I want to do when my mind is busy, but I know it’s the wrong thing.  So, I make a rare right choice and do the unnatural thing that I know I need to do even though I don’t want to do it.

I choose to embrace relationship and friendship.  I choose not to isolate, and I choose not to hide.  I embrace some of those who I know love me.  I immerse myself in their time and in their presence.

It’s the place I know I need to be.

It’s where I need to be, but my mind doesn’t quiet.  Even surrounded by people—people who care—my mind refuses to find silence.  It’s full of bitterness, rage, resentment, and no small amount of self-loathing.  My mind hates me, because I am worthy of its hate.  I have failed.  I have fallen again.  My mind won’t release me from my own condemnation.  It is my own worst enemy, and it seeks my destruction.

That’s when I look down to see the sweetness of a face and the  hand reaching for mine.  The child places her hand in mind and starts pulling.  She has someplace we need to go.

Her mother smiles as her young daughter whisks me away.  “She’s claimed you,” says the mother.  “You can’t escape now.”

I couldn’t escape.  Frankly, I didn’t want to.  There is something about the love of children that has always set me right.

“She’s a very good judge of character,” says the mother.  “If she’s claiming you it means you’re worthy of her trust.”

I wanted to break down there, but I waited until I was driving home, later after the evening had concluded.  I’ve had this understanding with my God for years, a thing that paces through my mind during hard times.  Even when my world is falling apart, even when I’m busy thinking the worst about myself, my God and I have always had strange understanding—if children and dogs still want to be around me, then I must be doing OK.

As I was driving away, God tapped into that understanding in my mind.  I couldn’t keep the tears out of my eyes, because He had used the face of a child to intercept the self-condemnation swirling in the weakness of my own mind.

“Children and dogs still want to be around you,” His voice spoke to my heart.  “You’re doing OK.”

It wrecks me.

That’s how God wrecks me.

He wrecks me beautifully.

But those who trust in the LORD will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31)