Can someone skate their heart out and pour themselves into a performance if they never had to fight, sweat, and strive to reach their long-sought after goals? Usually not. Passionate, happy tears don’t come after a great skate unless the skater has experienced the opposite. We are more thankful that we had clean performances when we have experienced what it was like to give poor performances.
When we don't perform well for whatever reason, it is easy for us to make excuses, have self pity, and have a bad attitude. Instead, if we recognize that it's okay to fail and decide to prepare better for next time, we are building a different type of endurance than just physical. All the while, something is being developed in you that is rare in this day-and-age. Character. Character can be defined as the distinctive, individual qualities in a person that show strength and depth of personal perception. Basically, having character means you are deep, and therefore you can connect with others on a deeper level and are are more equip to give advice and a helping hand.
Not many have character these days, because it is hard to have character. Even worse, sometimes when someone purses a goal for the wrong reasons, they develop bad character. Bad character is developed when someone decides to pursue a goal based on greed, lust, envy, and other bad motivators. You will need to ask yourself, why do I want to want this goal, such as to become a better skater. Is it just to get a metal to show I am better than everyone else or is it because I want to be the best skater I can be?
Personally, I had to focus on my relationship with God to understand why I skated, because it certainly was not just for fun anymore. As I grew closer to God's gentle presence, I understood that He was teaching me life lessons and growing my character through roller skating! My character was being formed in response to His endless love and goodness by the way He was teaching me to handle defeat and success. God, through Jesus, tells us we don't have to be perfect because He is perfect. He died for all of our imperfections and sins, and when we simply accept that free gift He gives us and welcome Him into our lives, we realize we are free from the crazy hard standards of skating, the world, and perfection in general. When we walk in this freedom, we are able to remain true to ourselves and therefore skate because we love it and it is a gift He gave us to grow our character. Not because we need to try to impress anyone else or be better than the next skater.
In Oswald Chambers book, My Utmost for His Highest, he writes, “No man is born naturally or supernaturally with character; he has to make character. " Character is something that is built overtime by trials. This is why some people who have had the hardest childhoods become greatly renowned in society, such as Beethoven and Albert Einstein. Unfortunate circumstances stood in their way but they overcame them. One way to refine our own character is to push ourselves out of our comfort zone to strive towards a goal. In this way, we control the circumstance enough to make it safe while pushing ourselves to be better than we were before.
So we push ourselves, even when we perform badly sometimes, to go back out there and work to reach our goals no matter what. As we learned last week, that is when we are creating physical and mental endurance. Then that endurance helps us build our character to skate for the right reasons, and strive to beat our own selves every time. When we strive like this for our goals, we find we gain something much more valuable in life than a metal - our character, or in other words, you find out who you are. Maybe, you'll even find who God is.
~ Endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Romans 5:4 ~