After about three weeks home after graduating university and spending about a week healing from my bike accident, I was determined to find myself a job. Since getting a field-related job to put on my resume was one of the main purposes of spending a gap year at home, a global pandemic and being hit by a car would by no means slow me down. I had the idea that a job would once again distract me from the triggers and general woes of PTSD, and interviewing for jobs (via Zoom) was fun and a great distraction. I was slowly getting back to it, meaning that running and general training were coming back slowly and I convinced myself that it was time to get moving. A month or so later I received a job offer from the YMCA as a COVID-19 relief teacher, where I would be spending my days helping at-risk middle school children with their online classes and provide extracurricular activities and lessons. This was my dream gap year job, especially because its hours would allow me to run and train under my new coach. I initially had to delay starting because my nose and chin injuries couldn’t withstand wearing a mask for more than about twenty minutes, so when the pain subsided, I set up a time to start my orientation at the YMCA.
Meanwhile, I had been slowly dealing with an increasing number of panic attacks, nightmares and flashbacks not to the bike accident a couple months prior, but to the accident back in Uganda. The faces of those I saw perish haunted my dreams and all of a sudden I could be transplanted back in time and unable to return to the present. I tried to ignore the smells of rotting flesh or overwhelming inadequacy, but the constant battle in my head manifested into a downgrading mind and body. As my aches in my body revealed the internal turmoil, anxiety and fear took over my daily walk. I kept trying to convince myself it would just get better with distraction, but the final straw came about ten minutes into orientation at my new job.
The lovely administrator asked me about the accident and how I was fairing, and she enquired about a certificate from a psychiatrist. I told her I hadn’t received an evaluation, but that I would be seeking one soon. In the most gentle way possible, she informed me I could not start work until receiving a medical psychiatric certificate in order to start work. With a smile and hope that it would only take a few weeks to obtain, the administrator sent me home and told me to look after myself.
I realise now that a long-term PTSD diagnosis might scare some people. To be fair, many people who do suffer from post-traumatic stress indeed show signs of aggression, anger, reclusivity and depression. If I did fit that stereotype, working with at risk kids would most definitely be inappropriate. Any liability for working with kids must be avoided, so in a very low state of anxiety and depression, I finally enlisted my mum’s help for getting the ball rolling. I first saw a number of pre-screening counsellors, who eventually secured me with a clinical psychologist for ongoing therapy. It took longer than I expected, but I was also sent to a psychiatric doctor to whom I explained my need to get the work-granting certificate.
This doctor was not keen on me starting work. With as much gentility as the administrator who sent me home, this doctor articulated a lack of confidence that I was genuinely okay. For now, he wouldn’t grant me a medical certificate to return to work and continued to book me in for a follow up almost four months later. With instructions to talk to my lawyer about recompensation from the settlement, and perhaps applying for disability, the doctor left me with an encouragement to really work on resting and healing.
I do not rest well.
Healing? I’m a champ at. My body has had to hurdle over high mountains to be able to heal each and every complicated injury, but resting is something I have struggled with my whole life. I’m learning a lot about what resting means. I hear it requires a lot of humility, but sometimes it just feels humiliating.
Rest isn’t easy, but it has always been key to better performance and decrease the chance of injury or burnout as a middle distance runner. It has required me to set aside what I think is necessary to succeed. To just be. To pause the commotion and intensity, and instead put my intense focus on building up.
Upon completion of my undergraduate years and then in a time of being unable to work, I’ve really struggled to make the connection from my rest from training and my rest from my other jobs and roles in life. Learning to pause while I heal feels like mental gymnastics.
Similarly, I have no doubt that the Jubilee Year in the Bible required a lot of faith and testing of the heart. After seven years of working, there were likely some (like me) who didn’t know how to not go out and harvest the fields. I’m sure questions like How will we eat? and How will we provide for our family? surfaced. The idea that they had to have stored up enough to not work for a whole year seems like a big jump of faith to me, and for my whole life I’ve lived by this lack of faith. I instinctively view both my training and work as something I need to be “on” for, 24/7. Taking a rest day, let alone a season or year seems like too much for me. Just imagine–how much could I get done in the same time as that rest? What about all the fitness I could gain, money I could make, people I could save in that time?
Oof.
As if I’m the one who saves a person or makes my body be able to rebuild itself. As if I got the job on my own in the first place. How could I let my view of success cloud my ability to see God? How could I continue to break myself down, physically and mentally, in the name of health?
For a number of years now, I have only been able to sustain healthy training if I take a day of no labourious physical activity. Perhaps I’ll go for a light walk, but mostly I try to not think about anything running related in order to keep my mind balanced and ready for the training to come. Some weeks I really look forward to my rest days. But most weeks, I dread taking a full day off training, even thought I know I would run myself into the ground otherwise. The seasons of injury taught me that I can do a whole lot more if I take a full day off to focus on sleeping as much as possible and doing as little as possible. This weekly ritual is honestly life-giving.
Logically, that doesn’t always seem to make sense. But to God, who understands the way my every cell and fibre work, it makes perfect sense. Of course I would take a day off training, because then I could push harder on anything from track sessions to long runs.
It took me a long time to admit I needed a weekly day of rest. On the days when I am internally kicking and screaming, I have to press harder into God’s commandment to rest. To rest means to pause the hard work and know that I will reap even more benefits if I stop.
I’m trying to have this view as I walk through a season of forced rest from school and work. My plans and my ideas of what a successful trajectory looks like are crumbling before me. As I get to be a full-time athlete, I feel I am quietly learning more about God than in my busy, “normal” season when I thought I was doing God’s work. But while unable to work or act or even socialise, I am put in a position of full surrender. And when I am on the floor, forehead pressed to the ground, there’s not a lot I can see. But I can see what is right in front of me.
What is right in front of you is exactly where God has called you. That is where He wants you. Here, your attention can only be on what is in front of you. Because you cannot look to what’s ahead, you have to trust God. You have to know that even though you feel humbled and humiliated, you can still rely on His goodness and sovereignty.
So while I spend my days learning to trust the Lord with my entire being, I am once again drawn back to the Māori term Whakapono. Trust God. Put your full faith in Him. It means knowing that I can trust God, even through the doubt and waves. I know that He is Lord through it all. I know that He will use every season and experience for His work and His glory. Time to reset.
He’s not punishing me. He’s building up my fibres. He’s repairing the broken bits and the things that weren’t working so well. He’s doing some major physiotherapy on my heart and mind as He re-wires me to function better. I rest and fight to believe that I will be okay throughout a season that doesn’t match what I think is going to propel me forward. I have to recall that God’s kingdom is a reverse economy where the weak are strong and the poor are rich. It won’t always make sense, but if I press into this counterintuitive thinking, it might just lead to an incredible breakthrough.
“He gives you both the grace and the power to do what He calls you to do. He puts it on your heart and gives you the power to do it.” So too, will He give you the power to to rest.
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