From a Break to a Breakthrough: Some Thoughts on Rest

Two weekends ago, I ran the slowest time I have ever received for a three-mile cross-country race.

With a perfectly flat course, I wanted to PR.

Turns out, I would finish far from that goal. And it hurt. I didn’t know what had happened—just that my legs ached and I felt dizzy.

I failed that race.

And normally I would head to the next practice with my A-game, ready to torture myself beyond my body’s limits.

But I was done with the torture. Instead, I decided that I was going to take a break.

For the next week, I was going to just let myself live.

I took a purposeful break from running, and I came back with some thoughts that I want to share with you now.

Stopping to catch your breath

One issue I’ve faced by starting my sophomore year of high school is constant comparison—not just comparing myself to others, but to previous versions of my own self.

Freshman year, I wouldn’t have felt so tired after that run.

Freshman year, I ran this course 20 seconds faster.

The achievements of my previous self haunt me, and it’s in those moments that I remind myself of this truth:

Life is a series of troughs and peaks.

It’s a truth that I discovered the summer before high school, when I had to read C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters for an assignment. In it, the characters point that out, and when I saw life from that perspective, my entire view seemed to change.

There are mountaintops, but there are also valleys.

And I’ve found that, when you fall into the valley, maybe…

Maybe you should give yourself a chance to catch your breath again. A chance to catch your breath before you continue the trek through the rest of the valley, before you begin your climb up the mountain.

There are valleys, but they’ll always rise to the mountaintop again.

And standing at the foot of the mountain can fill you with so much hope.

My fear has been that I’m not same runner that I was freshman year. That I can’t fight as hard.

And I’m not the same runner that I was freshman year. No, I’m a stronger one, even if I’m not always able to give my best fight.

After every injury, I would always find that, coming back from the break to recover, I was so much more excited for my runs.

Sometimes, it isn’t until something is taken from you that you realize just how much you love it. Just how much of a blessing it is to have it.

Because life can easily fall into a tedious cycle.

Another morning of doing math while half-asleep. Another afternoon of working out in the heat. And another evening of reading my history textbook until the words blur together.

(Perhaps you can relate?)

Somewhere in all of the ordinary, we can forget that we really are in a good place.

It’s life, a gift that God has given us.

Thankfully, my week of rest happened to fall at a time when I had a break from some of my classes. I finally got a chance to sleep in past the sunrise, to slow down, to just live.

My youth group leader talked about how God isn’t going to speak to you amidst all the noise of this wild life.

No, He’s going to speak to you in the silence.

And that silence comes from stopping to catch your breath.

During my break I had the chance to spend some time in prayer, pouring into a notebook all the reasons that I’m running in the first place.

And why are we running this race of the Christian life?

Perhaps we should ask ourselves that question more often.

Breakthroughs will come in time

In the week leading up to my slowest race, my health kept getting progressively worse. The dizziness and muscle aches started out as an occasional issue, but they quickly became a problem that I faced day after day.

Life is a series of mountains and valleys, and my health became worse before it got better. Every day during my break, I woke up feeling slightly stronger. Each morning I was just a little closer to a breakthrough.

Life is a series of mountains and valleys, and when my body holds me back like this, I can almost hear a small voice saying:

Your body is only holding you back so that when your breakthrough finally comes, you’ll have the strength to soar.

After putting your body through the difficult training days, you tear your muscles apart. But when your muscles have the rest to heal, they come back stronger than before.

Strength comes from resting, and as I learned that in my break, I also remembered how strength comes from waiting on God. The Bible never promises physical strength or success in this world, but it does promise a renewed strength to carry on in this race of the Christian life.

“Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
³¹ But those who wait on the Lord
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.”

~Isaiah 40:30-31

The Lord will renew our strength in His timing, and we can only wait on Him.

Deserts into gardens

I had to approach my break like a fast from running. Like a chance to lay down my goals and obsessions and just surrender…

Because I haven’t been doing that enough lately.

Goals become obsessions and obsessions become longing, and this longing has been a deep struggle of mine. A deep struggle paired with physical and mental weariness, but spiritual weariness too. So this verse from Isaiah 58 (a passage about fasting) resonated with me:

“And the Lord will guide you continually
    and satisfy your desire in scorched places
    and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
    like a spring of water,
    whose waters do not fail.”

~Isaiah 58:11, ESV

When your soul is always thirsty and your heart is longing for something more, the promise of satisfaction—satisfaction even in the scorched places—can change your life.

This verse promises that your scorched places will not just be watered, but they’ll become a spring of water.

They’ll become a desert turned into a watered garden, reminding a thirsty world to seek Christ. To wait on Him for strength and satisfaction beyond what lies in this world, and to notice all the blessings that He has already provided us.

I started running again that Thursday, the day before the race. It’s funny—after taking a break, it’s almost like you forget how to run. And then you get about a half mile in, and all the motions feel familiar. Your muscles remember—This is the thing that you’ve trained your body to do for years.

I ran strides across the grass field, under a soft sprinkling of rain.

Rain—sometimes it feels like a blessing straight from heaven, doesn’t it? Like a little reminder of how, in time, our scorched places will blossom into gardens.

I noticed the refreshment that the rain brought. The joy of having the strength to sprint again. The thoughtfulness of all my friends who prayed for me and texted me encouragement before the race.

And the race itself didn’t even end up being my best.

But maybe that doesn’t matter, because I ran it a minute faster than I had the last week. I was starting my climb again, and starting it with a restored purpose.

Sometimes it takes a break to notice the simple breakthroughs.