Breaking Old Rhythms

If there’s anyone I fight with the most, it’s me.

Some days my critical inner voice comes storming across the street with her big daddy, Insecurity, and all I can do is curl up, cover my liver and kidneys and hope for the best. Life itself is the biggest fight of all. Fighting to be normal and then fighting to be unique and original. Fighting to be loved and then sometimes fighting off the best of love when it comes to you. Fighting for the respect of others when we don’t respect others or ourselves.

Bruce Lee’s principle of Broken Rhythm hasn’t given me the desire to pummel a physical opponent. If anything, it has made me want to learn to fight the things that continue to defeat me: selfishness, pride, small thinking, refusing to trust God with all the things that worry me. It would stand to reason that if there is a rhythm to how a fighter shuffles his feet, swings his jabs or punches his hits, then maybe there is a rhythm to how we live, believe, hope, and surrender—and also a rhythm to how and when we don’t.

Breaking rhythm is about change, about dealing with delay, pause, surprise and all of the moments when life doesn’t unfold the way we want or expect. A friend of mine prayed, “Thank you, God, that nothing occurs to you.” At this point I ceased my agreeing amens to ponder the statement, but she was right. Nothing surprises God. He’s never thinking, “Oops, didn’t know that was gonna happen.”

God always knows and always has a plan.

The problem comes in when my plan is way different from his. I must think I’m pretty smart, to think I could have my whole life figured out, handle all my relationships and know exactly what to say and do at any given moment. God breaks my rhythm when he lets me see the distance between his plans for me and my plans for myself, the gap between his will and mine.

We have to make sure we’re fighting the fight that’s worth it. Paul writes, “Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called” (1 Timothy 6:11-12). Fighting for approval, to impress, to be better than anyone else, to spite anyone else—those fights are never worth it. Fighting to be your best, to be yourself, not to settle, to do what’s right, to live the live God calls us to—that is a worthy fight.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:24-27 ESV)

The beginnings and endings of relationships, changing schools, homes, states, getting dumped, being laid off or let go, losing a loved one--all of these--are examples of breaking rhythm. In some cases changing rhythm breaks us, leaving us splattered like the victims of some tragic hit and run. We’re left puzzled, stuck and sometimes without motivation to begin again. When we’re children, the idea of a do-over strikes our fancy. When we get older and attempt to grow up, we get sick of do-overs. We’d rather things didn’t have to change in the first place than to recreate normal after things have been ruined. It takes strength, sometimes more strength than we have or strength we fail to access.

Maybe you have been hoping for answers, explanation, vindication. I can’t promise all of that. I can promise that there is a way, no matter how painstaking, for you to pick up your pieces, become whole again and grow on. That is not my promise—it’s God’s. Sometimes God’s way of directing our path is literally by picking up our whole path and dropping us off where he means for us to be, but he never leaves us alone. The pain God allows is surgery, necessary for our healing and the healing of others. Sometimes pain is the only way we will learn how to walk, love, believe or live again. Get on your road, this time embracing with strength that another moment of change is coming soon and this time you’ll lean into its wind and embrace it.

 

The above is an excerpt from Chapter 3, “The Rhythm of Fighting” in Amena's first book, Breaking Old Rhythms.