back then.

I often find that, even though the Bible says that we are to “count it all joy” when we enounter trials (James 1:2), to “remain steadfast under trial” (James 1:12), and to rejoice because the “tested genuineness of your faith…may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (I Peter 1:6-7), it is still very difficult for us to keep those things in mind and follow through with them when we are struggling.  I have had too many conversations with people who love Jesus and complain that it’s “not fair” when they go through hardship.  Believe me when I say that I fall into that trap too from time to time.  We sometimes fail to see that trials can lead to things such as increased faith, a new desire and ability to rely on God’s provision, a more dynamic prayer life, a renewed thirst to love and be loved in authentic community, and an overall shift in perspective which understands that God is God and we are not.  God PROMISES that He will never leave us or forsake us (Joshua 1:5, Hebrews 13:5) and He is faithful to keep His promises (some references include Deuteronomy 7:9, Psalm 33:4, Psalm 111:7, Psalm 145:13, 1 Corinithians 1:9, 2 Thessalonians 3:3, 2 Timothy 2:13, Hebrews 10:23).

So in the attitude of encouragement toward steadfastness and faith in the midst of struggles, I want to share what I consider to be the most pivotal part of my walk with God prior to entering college.

This is my story, from back then:

Although I committed my life to Jesus at the age of 7, it wasn’t until the age of 14 when God began to really test the steadfastness of my faith.

It all started when my dad put me in gymnastics at the age of 6 1/2.  He took me to a small gym in Sacramento, run by then-U.S. National Gymnastics Team choreographer, Geza Pozsar.  Within a short while, I was moved up into the “Hopes” group for the young kids who showed potential, and soon after that, my little cohort and I moved up to the “Super Hopes” group as we prepared to compete.  Then, at the age of 8 (the youngest age allowed to compete back then), we began competing level 5.  

I wasn’t really that good in level 5.  Or in level 6.  Or in level 7.  I mean, I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t anything special.  I just kept working hard and pushing forward.  After level 7, we skipped into level 9 – “optionals”.  Now we were getting somewhere.  We were becoming real gymnasts.   I competed my first level 9 meet in Honolulu, Hawaii at the age of 10.  I did just alright in level 9, nothing special.  By this time, most of my friends from the Hopes cohort had moved on to more well known gyms in the area and around the country.  But I had stayed at the little gym in Sacramento from which they had never really produced any good “home grown” gymnasts.

At the age of 11 – in the sixth grade – I prepared to compete level 10.  Level 10 is a big deal because it’s the level just below elite.  Girls who compete in the Olympics are elites.  I wasn’t so sure about the Olympics at that point, but I wanted to be an elite.  

Just a few weeks before my first level 10 meet, as I trained on the Bars, I fell off and felt a sharp pain in my rolled left ankle.

Broken.

To me, the timing was just awful.  Looking back, however, God used that year off from competition to help me get stronger, A LOT more flexible (a must in gymnastics), and to learn a bunch of new skills.  I also became much closer to my coach, Trudi, during that time, and I am still so grateful to her for taking care of me like her own daughter during that time.   God knew I would need both the boost in skills and the experience of being cared for by a non-parent as I moved forward in my life.

For the next 2 years, from the ages of 12-13, I competed level 10 and kicked booty.  Really.  My second year of level 10 nationals, I placed 9th in the nation on beam and vault.  And in the first round of competition the night before that, I earned the highest score on beam out of the whole national competition.  God started to allow me to see the fruits of my many, many hours of training, and it was exciting.

Next thing I knew, at the age of 14, I was an elite.  I had the opportunity to be the demonstration gymnast in the U.S. National Team Ballet Training Video that year, in addition to making a Strength and Conditioning video to send to my friend in Finland to use with their national team.  Things were looking up. 

Maybe my oversimplification of that three-year period makes it sound like life and training was a breeze, but let me assure you, it was not.  I experienced my fair share of injuries.  ”Battle wounds”, as I like to call them.  Knocked unconscious falling off the beam, resulting in a seizure, concussion, broken right thumb, and an ambulance ride – back in training the following week.  Teeth through the bottom lip after hitting the bar, resulting in several stitches without being numbed, because I had a nurse who couldn’t figure out how to do it right (that was super fun) – took 3rd at level 10 regionals and qualified to my first level 10 nationals 3 days later.  Busted-open right eyebrow after hitting the bar, resulting in stitches done by a plastic surgeon and a gnarly black eye that I sported oh so proudly to school the next day – back to training as usual.  Chunk of skin sliced off my left shin as I misjudged where the end of the beam was during a series, resulting in a permanent gouge (not to mention, some skin to clean up from the end of the beam!).  Busted the Bursa Sac in my left elbow, resulting in a balloon of an elbow that the doctors said would drain itself within a few days – I had a huge, squishy, “water balloon” elbow until then.  Comparment Syndrome in both my shins, resulting in several physical therapy appointments to Kaiser every week, to the point that my mom let me write the co-pay checks and walk into the appointments myself and my therapist could hook me up to my machine for 20-40 minutes and leave me alone so I could take a nap and be rested to go to practice right afterward.  Severely pulled left high-hamstring, resulting in more physical therapy visits – trained and competed as usual and the injury drug on.  Problems with my IT band, resulting in – yep – more physical therapy.  And then, of course, there were your standard hyperextended knees and elbows, rips and blood blisters, cuts and bruises.  

It all builds character, I tell you. 

As I began high school with a training and school schedule that most adults would likely not enjoy, things continued to go well.  I won the first elite meet I ever competed in.  I continued to learn new skills.  I got stronger and faster and more competitive.  I began to pick up on conversations that my parents would have with my coaches, conversations that consisted of considerations regarding my potential to really make it as an elite.  To make it onto the U.S. National Team.  To make it to a U.S. National Training Camp.  To make it to the Olympics.  To me, it all seemed to be way over my head.  I didn’t really think about dreaming that big.  But I did want to keep working hard and go as far as I could.  

As my frehsman year of high school progressed, the duration and intensity of my training continued to mount until I really just wished that I could have a normal life.  A life that I saw the people at my school had, where they went to school first thing in the morning instead of to training, where they got to play in P.E. instead of doing study hall, where they hung out with friends after school instead of going back to training, where they slept in on Saturdays and did fun things instead of going to training, and where they actually got to go on vacation during breaks from school instead of going to training.  

Are you getting the idea?

Sometime during my freshman year, I made a plan.  I decided that I would work really hard so that I would at least have a shot at making it to the Olympics.  Then, once the year 2000 came and went, whether I made it to the Olympics or not, I would be done with gymnastics.  Done.  The idea of being done was so blissful that it made me smile.  When I was done – I thought – there would be no more expectations.  No more pressure.  No more structure.  Just peace.  I would have a whole year of high school left without gymnastics, and then I would go to UCLA, where I had always wanted to go to college, and truly be a normal student, leaving all of this behind.

Then, on the first day of summer vacation, right after the end of my freshman year, God swooped in with a new plan, and suddenly, my plan was insufficient.

While training on the bars around 11:00 that Friday morning, a few hours of practice and a considerable amount of fatigue already in my back pocket, an accident occurred.  Since I was training for an upcoming elite meet (the U.S. Classic) which would qualify me for U.S. Nationals, I had been working on adding more difficulty into my bar routine.  For those of you familiar with the sport, I was adding in a healy turn/half pirouette right before my Tkatchev.  On what seemed like my hundredth try on my bar routine for the day, I chalked up, mounted, kipped up, did the healy, and — fell.

I fell bad.

In fact, as soon as I fell, and even though my right shin was covered in athletic tape, my coaches knew my right ankle was broken.  

As they packed ice all around it and called my parents to come get me and take me to the hospital, I literally thought, Maybe this is it!  Maybe this means I’ll get to take a break from gymnastics!  If it’s really broken, I won’t be able to train for weeks!  I didn’t even feel the slightest pang of guilt for thinking those thoughts.  I could almost taste the imminent freedom.

 The pain that followed just a few hours later was, to this day, the worst I have ever experienced.  My right fibula and tibia had both been broken, but the bottom half of the break had become displaced and pushed up beyond the edge of the top half of the break (though not a compound fracture, thank goodness!).  This meant that the doctors had to set my ankle before they could even begin to consider surgery.  I remember holding my dad’s hand, sqeezing as tightly as possible, and screaming out very loudly as  two or three doctors made a solid yank on my ankle.  Passers-by stared in curiosity and disbelief.  ”We’re going to have to try again,” one male doctor told me, signaling that they had been unsuccessful in their first attempt.  I wanted to punch them all so bad.  And when they told me that I was going to have to try and relax?  Relax?! I thought, You try and relax while I yank on YOUR broken ankle and then see how YOU feel!  After a second, more successful attempt, the doctors assured me that they were done, and went on their merry way.

Fast forward to the next day.  

I was now the proud owner of a titanium plate, five titanium screws, two titanium pins, nearly 50 staples, a pair of crutches, and a very sore right ankle.  I was told that the orthopoedic surgeon on duty that night had happened to be the hospital’s best, and that he had taken good care of me.  I was also told that my best gym friend Karma’s dad, who was a nurse at that hospital, was also on duty that night and so had been providing me the reassurance of a familiar face as he passed through the halls.

Over the next few weeks, I was bedridden.  For real.  My mom gave me a little bell to ring for anything I needed.  She is amazing and took care of me like nobody’s business.  If I wanted a plate-full of peanut butter and honey, she made it for me.  If I needed more saltines to take with my medication, she made sure I had a whole sleeve of them.  I couldn’t do anything myself.  Couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom, couldn’t take my vicodin without supervision, couldn’t get up and find food.  Nothing.  My independence had been completely taken from me.  And, incidently, so had my fail-proof plan.

My plan of doing gymnastics until 2000 and then being done had been completely derailed.

I was so mad at God.  Since I could only sit in bed all day, I took up journaling (which, in retrospect, was probably a very healthy thing to do.  Maybe God began healing me before I even realized it.)  I cursed at God and I blamed Him for messing everything up, for messing up my plan.  I did not “count it all joy” to find myself in this mess, nor did I “remain steadfast,” as Scripture tells us to do.  I was just plain angry at God.

My only reprieve from the anger was the fact that, in my mind, I didn’t have to do gymnastics ever again.  The doctor had told me that, in four months, I would have to have another surgery to remove all the hardware from my ankle (which to this day I still have with me in a drawer of my apartment), and even then it would still take me a good 4-6 months after the second surgery to get back to full strength.  At that point, it would have been nearly a year since my injury, the Olympics would only be a year away, and it would pretty much be impossible to make it.

I was done – or so I thought.

Enter loving father.

My dad is amazing.  Though he understood my frustration, he also encouraged me to look beyond my circumstances and into the big picture.  I had always wanted to go to UCLA – his alma mater – and he straight-up asked me, “How are you going to get into UCLA without gymnastics?  You know you have really good grades, but so does everyone else who applies there.  And out of your high school?  That’s gonna be really tough.”  Maybe that sounds harsh, but it was true.  I had lived in a fantasy world where I thought I could do whatever I set my mind to.  My dad brought me back to reality and showed me that, sometimes, you have to adjust your plan in order to achieve what you have worked so hard for.

Though I resisted stubbornly, over the next few weeks, my plan to leave gymnastics behind began to slowly crumble.  I realized that, if I wanted to make it to UCLA – or to any good university for that matter – I was going to have to do it through gymnastics.  As soon as I made the decision to re-enter the sport and pursue a gymnastics scholarship, my dad stepped right in and helped me get started on the arduous process of writing letters and sending out recruiting tapes to the top 20 gymnastics programs in the country.  He bought me a file box, file folders, and a date stamp, and he taught me how to use all of those things to stay organized in my correspondence with all of the schools.  Though I was only a sophomore in high school at the time, this allowed me to be ahead of the game in terms of my recruiting class.  Those programs likely received tapes from me well before they received tapes from any other recruits in my grade.  Had I not been injured at the time, this would not have been the case.  I would have not sent out recruiting tapes.  And no university gymnastics program likely would have ever heard from me.  

I should mention that, during my recovery time, I embarked on my first experience of volunteering with underserved children.  Every Wednesday after school, I went to the gym of my church and hung out with the kids from the low-income apartments next door, playing with them and helping them with their homework.  After it was over, my mom would pick me up and take me to the gym so I could do my conditioning.  The amazing relationships I developed with these kids showed me that they were no different than “regular” kids – they just needed someone to love them and really show them that they mattered.  I still think about those kids and wonder where they are now — especially little three-year-old Antovia who talked like she was fifteen and nine-year-old Lisa with her broken glasses, who would only do her math homework with me.  Her math grade went from a D to a B in a matter of months, and her family started coming to church as a result of her Wednesday experiences.  Lisa literally just needed to know that someone cared about her.  Had I not been injured, I don’t know that I ever would have been able to experience any of that during high school.  My gymnastics – my plan - would have gotten in the way of what God ended up teaching me through those kids.

In addition to opening me up to the world of volunteering with underprivileged children, my time off from gymnastics also offered me the chance to open up to becoming more involved at school.  I joined student government.  I took Driver’s Ed.  I even got voted into Homecoming Court that year.  I deepened friendships that had  existed only on a surface level during my freshman year.  In particular, the relationship I developed with my friend Trisha during that time is one that has persisted to this day.  I was the maid of honor in her wedding and she was a matron of honor in mine.  I am so grateful for our friendship and I can’t even imagine what those last three years of high school would have been like without her.  She is amazing. 

As I finally began training again, now 15 years old but many more years wiser, I beheld a new sense of why I was doing my sport.  It wasn’t for my coaches.  It wasn’t for my parents.  It was for me.  I was doing gymnastics because it was what I loved to do and it was a talent that God had blessed me with that I wanted to develop to the best of my ability.  Period.  I experienced so much peace and freedom.  Consequently, I was injured less, I enjoyed training more, and I was able to take more responsibility for my gymnastics than I ever had before.

By the time I was 16 years old, I had given UCLA  a verbal agreement that I would  join their 2001 freshman class on a full gymnastics scholarship.  To be honest, if I hadn’t gotten my recruiting tapes out as early as I did, I don’t think I would have ended up at UCLA.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe God would have still led me there.  But, in my plan, I wasn’t going to do gymnastics in college.  I wouldn’t have gone to UCLA to do gymnastics.  I don’t know how I would have gotten in had I not gotten injured and sent in tapes a year before most people typically do.  And being at UCLA has a significance all in it’s own (I even met my husband there), but you can read about that on my “here and now” page (COMING SOON!).

Over the next two years, I enjoyed my time as a high school-aged student-athlete to the fullest.  My junior year of high school, I became the student body Secretary.  I also finished second in the nation on the Floor at the Level 10 National Championships.  My senior year of high school, I became the student body president.  I also had become one of the top Level 10 gymnasts on the West Coast, winning the State and Regional Championships.  At Level 10 Nationals that year, our Region I team won the National Championship, and I placed fourth overall, earning a spot on the Level 10 National Team and a training trip to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, the summer after my senior year of high school.

By the time I graduated high school in 2001, I was truly amazed at the ways in which God had used my injury – the major collapse of my seemingly perfect plan – to humble me, help me to trust Him, and gain the training and life experiences I needed in order to move forward in my life.  As mentioned earlier, I really believe that if I hadn’t gotten injured, I wouldn’t have gotten into UCLA. 

And in case you haven’t figured it out by now, this is my testimony.  This is how God has molded me, transformed me, and taught me – through struggles and through triumphs.

So please be encouraged.  I know that my story is merely one of billions.  Not everyone experiences God in the same way, and I don’t imply that your story should be like my story.  But let God write your story, and then follow His lead.  Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.