Katelyn Ohashi took the internet by storm on January 12th when the video of her floor exercise routine performed at the Collegiate Challenge at the Anaheim Convention Center hit YouTube. She earned a perfect 10 for her rocking, joyful romp to Michael Jackson’s hits. Flying through the air, landing in jaw-dropping splits, shaking her curled bob, the girl took cyberspace by storm. You can’t stop smiling when you watch her performance. Check it out here.
Among the accolades, photos, plaques, and championship banners decorating the walls of the UCLA practice gym, next to the names of the All-Americans and Olympians who have graced that room is a quote in silver script that says: “The only person you are destined to become is the one you decide to be.”
Today, Ohashi is a senior at UCLA and captain of the team. Gymnastics has been her life. She grew up with three brothers and her parents in Seattle. When Katelyn showed real promise in gymnastics her mother moved her to Kansas City and then to Plano, Texas. She made the junior national team when she was 12 and moved into a gymnastics environment that she now calls “toxic.” Despite her thin frame she was regularly insulted for her size. Even as she excelled at the elite level, she wrote in her journal about the pain, both physical and mental, that she was suffering. In her last performance as an elite gymnast, she defeated Simone Biles to win the 2013 American Cup.
It was after that win, with a debilitating back injury that she walked away. She wouldn’t miss the leotards, the constant judgment, and certainly, she wouldn’t miss the excruciating pain she had developed. She felt the fun had been taken away too soon. As Ohashi said, “As much as you love a sport, I don’t think love and joy necessarily go hand in hand. I think you can still be in love with the sport but just not happy in it.” It took a year before she started to miss it. She had shoulder surgery, spent 4 months in a back brace, and then, when she was 18, she contacted UCLA to see if they would let her compete there. Coach Kondos Field made a promise to help Ohashi rediscover joy in gymnastics.
Recently, a reader of this devotional blog commented that perhaps there was not the same kind of joy or inspiration in my writing that was once there. I’ve been reflecting on that feedback now for nearly a week and I think I finally know how to express it.
Each of our lives is a journey. When I read the story of the Exodus I am reminded again and again of the journey they took. They were forced to “perform” for the Egyptians, slaves to cruel taskmasters. When Moses came along, putting on display the wonders and miracles of God not just for Pharaoh and the Egyptian people, but for the Israelites as well, they sort of woke up. They saw that there was a different way. They perhaps stopped viewing God as something or someone distant from them. Someone to be accessed only through an intermediary. He was actually someone who cared about them quite directly and enough to save them, to lead them back to him.
To varying degrees, we have all found ourselves in that position: slaving away at a life that, even if we loved it, was not filled with joy. We searched for that joy in external ways—a different job, new friends, a new spouse, a different town, a different church, but still the joy eluded us.
One day we suddenly realize the joy that is missing is not related to any of those things with which we have surrounded ourselves. The joy is missing because we’ve lost purpose, we’ve forgotten that the one we feared, the one who brought judgment, demanded an immeasurable kind of belief, who promised heaven or threatened hell, was not who we thought he was at all. That’s where the joy comes in, or perhaps, that’s where the joy comes back.
Katelyn Ohashi said she was able to return to gymnastics when she stopped doing it just for greatness. In fact, she frightened her coach on that first day her freshman year when a sports psychologist sat down with the team and asked each gymnast to share: What is the greatest obstacle keeping you from success? Ohashi’s answered in front of the whole team and the coaching staff, “I just don’t want to be great again.”
Today Ohashi sees a life beyond gymnastics. She’s an accomplished poet and photographer. She is an activist in the truest sense in that she actually does something about the things she cares about. She organized a Meet the Bruin’s exhibition to raise money for the Bruin Shelter which provides housing to students who are homeless. She keeps a box of granola bars in her car and hands them out to homeless people she meets in Westwood. As her teammate Kyla Ross said, “Everything she does is with a purpose.” It was when Ohashi found a life outside gymnastics that the joy returned.
That’s where my joy comes from these days. That’s why I am incredibly inspired by those dusty old stories from the “Old Testament,” those pages of commandments and ordinances from God. You see, it’s not an “old testament.” It’s not out-dated and irrelevant to me. It’s not about an “angry” God or punishment. Instead it has come alive as real people who struggled with the same issues that I struggle with. Those laws have deeper meaning. They aren’t just about goring oxes or sacrifices or strange feasts and festivals. They go much deeper. Learning those meanings, seeing how the laws about how to treat others will never be old and having God’s word tell me what to eat or when to celebrate Sabbath is not “law” that ensures my trip to heaven, it’s him telling me that he cares about every single aspect of my life. That mighty hand and out-stretched arm is for me, right here, right now.
Where is my joy? Where is my inspiration? It is in discovering purpose in life that is more than surviving this world for something better. That’s a Greek philosophy if ever I heard one. My purpose is to do God’s work in this life, to leave the world a little better than it was, to witness not with my mouth, but with my actions.
The words that grace the walls at the UCLA practice gym should be words that will inspire each of us. “The only person you are destined to become is the one you decide to be.” God has most definitely given us choices to make in this world. He didn’t give us his commandments knowing we would fail, that we couldn’t possibly keep them. He didn’t put us on this earth to endure the drudgery of life so he could bring us home to heaven in the end. Either of those would make him a cruel god. He put us here to be in relationship with him today. To be his partners in life right now. To live according to his word and leave the world a better place because we were here. Tikkun olam. Repair the world. That’s where the joy and the inspiration comes from. That’s where this blog comes from.
May you find the joy that God hides in plain sight in his word. May the Torah open up your eyes to the deeper and VERY relevant meaning of his commands. May you approach your life with purpose and know that you are destined to be exactly the one you decide to be. God is behind you all the way.
I Am My Father's Daughter 