With the Winter Olympics on center stage this week, there's a persistent memory that keeps flashing back in my brain. I'm not sure which looms larger to me - the Olympic memory or the lesson I learned from it.
It was February, and I was speaking at a conference in Holland. The Winter Olympics were going on in Europe that year, but they just weren't on my radar. Until the afternoon I had the TV on in my room while I was getting dressed for the next meeting. The commentary was all in Dutch - which was all Greek to me. Until the announcer spoke a name I knew.
In high school, she was active in a Christian campus club I directed. She heard about Jesus there and eventually made a personal commitment to Him. I hadn't seen her since she was in high school - until that afternoon in Holland. There she was, an Olympic ice skater, representing the U. S. When I think Winter Olympics, I remember the amazing surprise of seeing what that young woman had become.
Actually, I wasn't totally surprised, because I knew her when the Olympics could not have been more than a distant dream. When she was, as a teenager, paying the price to be a champion. Every morning of the week, while her fellow students were still counting z's, she was at the local ice rink, practicing...and practicing. While her friends were relaxing during the summer, she was in a Colorado training program, working...and working.
At one point, the teenage blonde who became an Olympian was in the rink when a tornado hit. She was seriously injured when the roof collapsed. And she battled back from that injury to practice and work some more, every morning at 5:00 A.M.
During those European Olympics, the world saw her in all her Olympic glory. We knew her long before that, and we knew how she got there - through a thousand invisible mornings where she paid the price to be a champion. No one saw her; no one knew or cared if she was at that rink, but she just kept showing up.
It turns out that the secret of being a spiritual champion is pretty much the same - a thousand invisible mornings...with Jesus. He set the example by showing up morning after morning to spend time with His Father. Then when He called the men He'd build His life's work on, "He appointed twelve...that they might be with Him" (Mark 3:14). The first job of a disciple - be with Jesus. It must have worked. When the men who helped crucify Jesus hauled Peter and John in for questioning, "...they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13).
You can tell when someone's spent a lot of time with Jesus. There's something magnetic about them - an authority, a confidence, a power, a caring. People become like the people they hang out with. When you hang out with Jesus, you become more and more like Him.
Why are there so many Christians who have a head full of Jesus, but live such ordinary - even hypocritical - lives? Why do so many of us have a roller coaster faith, with occasional glorious highs, punctuating long stretches of bland mediocrity? Because we won't pay the price to be a champion.
That price is to make our daily time with Jesus non-negotiable; the anchor of our daily schedule - the "sun" around which all the other "planets" of our life must revolve. Christian meetings and events won't do it. Great Bible teaching or Christian fellowship won't do it. There simply is no substitute for the love-driven discipline of spending time with Jesus. We meet Him in His Book. It's the love letter that allows us to hear His heart until we can be in His presence; that enables us to be with Him until we can really be with Him in heaven.
A vibrant, powerful relationship with Jesus Christ is rooted in those thousand invisible mornings with Jesus. No one will know if you show up - except Jesus. But if you do show up consistently, people will notice the difference, and be strangely drawn to the Jesus in you. He'll show up tomorrow morning, as He has every morning since you met Him. Be there.