May 27, 2020 I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole, as they say. I’ve been watching far too much YouTube during this pandemic. For some strange reason, YouTube recently started suggesting mountain biking videos for me. I love street cycling, and I love adventures, so I started watching videos of brave individuals hurling themselves down mountains, jumping rocks, making sharp turns on rocky terrain and navigating narrow dirt trails. I stumbled upon a channel of a rather mediocre rider. His videos include content of him riding with professional mountain bike racers (apparently that’s a thing) to show how well the professionals ride relative to him and to get tips from them. I recently watched a video by that content creator in which he rode with a female professional mountain biker. She evaluated his skills. When it came time to offer the YouTuber tips to improve, she had only one tip, and it didn’t involve how he shifted his weight, went into turns or approached a jump. She noted that he let his fear hold him back from “sending it,” as the bikers say, and truly committing to going fast and jumping high. She advised him to sing a song or focus on his breathing as he approached sections of a trail that he would typically plan for extensively in his head and trust his body and abilities. The YouTuber took her advice. He made the next lap down the trail singing out loud. And he sent it. He flew through sections of the trail that had previously slowed him down significantly. He got out of his head and out of his own way. He stopped overthinking and started trusting. I thought about how often I get in my own way. How often I let fear or “what ifs” or my dwelling on my failures stop me from trusting the Lord and following His calling in my life, how I sometimes overthink and talk myself out of doing something I know I’m called to do. Following the Lord isn’t easy. We’re often called to do challenging things, things that seem outside our areas of expertise and comfort levels. But if we trust the Lord to equip us to serve in the ways He calls us to do so, we, too, can accomplish things that seem impossible. At least when we’re not falling down the YouTube rabbit hole. |
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